


My Fiction Sure Beats The Hell Out Of My Truth

by KatyTheInspiredWorkaholic



Series: writer!Daryl [1]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Zombie Apocalypse, Bartender!Daryl, Daryl is an awkward-turtle and doesn't know how to talk to people, Ensemble Cast, M/M, Rick being gorgeous and oblivious, Season 01 parody, Unrequited Crush, accidental-writer!Daryl, and thinks a lot, everyone is in it at some point - Freeform, so he stares a lot, sort of, writer problems throughout that we will ALL relate to
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-12
Updated: 2016-11-04
Packaged: 2018-08-08 09:30:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 39,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7752313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KatyTheInspiredWorkaholic/pseuds/KatyTheInspiredWorkaholic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daryl watches Rick, as often as the man enters the bar he works at, and never gets to speak to him (and when he does it's never quite what Daryl had pictured in his head) but after months of staring at the officer across the crowded bar - Daryl feels like he knows him. Because out of all the stories that he makes up in his head to pass the time, there's one starring the officer and it sticks with him so much that he finally decides to pick up a pen and try to write it down. </p><p>And it's a story we all know and love.</p><p>This is the narrative of a quiet, imaginative Daryl who daydreams stories of the people he serves at the bar, and finally writes one down when he wonders what the man with the amazing blue eyes would do in a fight or die situation. And somehow knows without a doubt he would fight tooth and nail, adapt and do whatever it took, and not only survive - but thrive.</p><p>**On temporary hiatus**</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This has been my baby since March of this year, and I can't believe I've gotten so far on it. It's over half-way written, and I wouldn't have gotten this much done (while not posting it) without all the wonderful people at the RWG. Who cheered me on and helped me out and read so many snippets they've basically read all of the first 6 chapters. But I'm ready to post it, and I hope it lives up to everyone's expectations.
> 
> BIG shoutouts to the duo that double-teamed beta-ing this monster: ijustwantedyoutoneedme and MaroonCamaro worked tirelessly and listened to me bitch and whine for months, this wouldn't have been possible without them. And Riastarstruck gets an honorable mention as well because she's been my one-woman cheerleading squad late into the early hours of the monring making me write and edit until my fingers bled. As does Starfire_Wildheart for being my faithful sprinting partner. Thank you everyone, this story is for you.
> 
> This first fic only covers season 01 of The Walking Dead, refrences and quotes galore throughout, I own _nothing_ and this is the first time I'm throwing up a disclaimer because the show is so embedded in this fic I should probably give Robert Krikman a writing credit. But thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy.
> 
> EDIT: I'll update every weekend while I finish writing the last couple chapters :)

\--

Daryl wasn’t a great bartender. He wasn’t one of those fancy ones that were featured on TV that spun bottles in their hands and set shots on fire, and he couldn’t pronounce half the shit on the shelves, but he was the perfect fit for the hole in the wall Dale bought over off Main Street. He was quiet, tough but not so scary he wasn’t approachable, could pour a beer without foaming out half the keg, and knew enough drink recipes to get by without having to look them up on the app on his phone.

Although Dale had started him on a trial run before out-right hiring him, with a last name like Dixon he was lucky to get even that, Daryl had quickly proven himself enough to earn a full-time job at the dive bar. He didn’t get health care or anything like that, but it wasn’t under the table and Daryl got his first shot at being a regular, taxpaying American for the first time in his 35 years living in the deep South. With Merle in prison for the third time, half way through a five-year stint if he got out on good behavior again, Daryl was happy to have the distraction. He wasn’t that great with people, or talking to them, but he liked being around them – liked watching them, silently eavesdropping on their conversations, piecing together the picture of their life beyond the bar stool. It was a little intrusive, “creepy” was the exact word his weekend co-worker T-Dog had called it, but he wasn’t hurting anyone – and he didn’t ever really tell anyone the little stories he came up with in his head. So he tried to not let it bother him too much.

He had an elaborate map of their lives, intertwined in such a way one would think it was like any other small town instead of bordering Northern Atlanta, but after a few months - Daryl found he had grown bored of his own little soap opera he’d discovered among their lives. There was only so much that could go on that wasn’t straight from a telenovela, or the same typical small town gossip and bullshit that bored him to tears. And that’s where the patrons came in, because after a few rounds the drunken stories he listened in on got _strange_ , and the question and answer session always ended up outright bizarre. What were you like in high school? Ever thought of being a cowboy – what’s the point of a _space_ cowboy? We should start a band, we can’t play one instrument but we should, what’s our name? If you made it in Hollywood what would you do? End of the world, who’s on your team?

So soon Daryl started amusing himself by indulging in their exaggerated stories – imagining Sgt. Ford in that biker gang he always wanted to run away and join. Had a whole story going after a while, he’d be a badass for sure, unapologetic and ready to kick anyone’s teeth in. They’d use him as muscle, of course, he’d be good at it with his military training. That or he could join the mob, but that seemed more Jim’s thing. Jim was a quiet friend of Dale’s who owned the auto-body shop Daryl worked at before the bar, but he always had a little something off about him – like he could snap and burn the place down if he ever hit “fuck it” and didn’t want to hear the bleach blonde soccer moms bitch about their SUVs anymore.

Then the stories about each person that walked through the doors got bizarre, rock stars and college stories that matched what Daryl had seen on TV – since he had never gone to college – throwing his patrons into other countries, black ops or secret organizations, witchcraft or famous actors, owning a ranch or suddenly learning they could set things on fire just by looking at them. Finding that the person they pretended to be friends with finally saw that they loved them deeper than they ever loved anything, or finally kicking in the fucker’s teeth that had been holding them back for _so_ long. Each person had their own story, their own world, that Daryl had created for them inside his head. Though he would never share with them what he thought, barely talked to them as is. Couldn’t say what he imagined up, the potential he saw in them. That they could do things far greater than sit in his dingy bar and drink their way into the liver damaged sorry assholes who never left the hole in the wall.

But sometimes he wanted to, when they were drowning themselves in their whiskey glasses and pint after pint of beer. Sometimes he found the strength to finally open his mouth and give those tiny words of encouragement that probably weren’t half as inspirational as they sounded in his head. That maybe could’ve meant something if they weren’t brushed off right away. Small, short phrases, punctual and impacting (in theory) if the ones who heard them weren’t wasted when he spoke. It was just another reason Daryl mostly kept to himself, no one wanted to hear his opinions anyway.

So he kept imagining his narratives, his own mental Netflix of stories and tales far too fanciful to ever utter a single word of them. They were fun to keep going, as each patron came and went every week in their own routines that Daryl had down without even meaning to.

And then there was him.

The man with the striking blue eyes and short cropped dark curls, 5 o’clock shadow always consistent whenever Daryl saw him - showing he shaved every morning like clockwork. He had a soft smile that brightened like the sun after his patrol partner got two beers in him, and a laugh that was sometimes too loud once the first pitcher was gone, though he always caught himself a second later and looked a little embarrassed about it. It was so – _endearing_ – which was not something Daryl was used to thinking about another man. But all through his shifts, on Tuesday and Thursday nights when the two sheriff deputies came strolling in a little after nine, Daryl always found himself staring at him.

There wasn’t even a story going in his head those first few weeks, long before he knew the man’s name, his gaze would just gravitate towards the two who never sat at his bar top – always playing pool in the back or leaning against the tall tables by the windows.  And the absence of his usual mental narratives startled him more than Daryl wanted to admit, he was so distracted by the sight of the other man his brain just seemed to shut off. Too focused on not getting caught staring. He hadn’t had a full blown crush on someone that was a stranger to him since he was 16 and still learning about that facet of himself. But when he realized that he didn’t have a story in mind yet, his mind began whirling with possibilities. What was his name? Where was he from? What was he like? Did he have a family? He looked like a family man, with a white picket fence, a gorgeous wife, couple of kids and a dog. But he held himself a little differently than the other cookie-cutter husbands, especially every time the two men came into the bar still in uniform, impressively steady and veiling coiled strength beneath the khaki outfit. He looked dangerous on occasion, too. Whenever he’d had a bad day and his partner – Shane Walsh (Daryl discovered from his credit card one night, when they didn’t have enough cash to cover the tab) – had dragged him in begrudgingly. But it wasn’t an explosive danger, like his brother or his Pa. It was a quiet kind of rage that he kept caged in his chest like a wild animal, quiet and easily overlooked to anyone who wasn’t watching.

And Daryl soon found that he was _always_ watching. Mentally cataloguing all he could learn about the other man – he liked Budweiser in a bottle over tap, he didn’t smoke cigarettes but seemed to gravitate towards areas clouded in the fumes, he was good at pool and sucked at darts, couldn’t sing to save his life, and he didn’t care for football but when basketball was on he always had his eye on the University of Kentucky, though that accent should have given that away. If he could hear him talk clearly, and not just warbled words from across a crowded room, Daryl couldn’t imagine what he’d learn then.

But all he really wanted to learn, more than anything, was the man’s name.

\--

There was a haunting look in the clear blue depths of his eyes one night in late January, so distant and lost, a sadness that bordered on numb, and Daryl could feel it all the way across the bar. It radiated, spoke volumes of distress and ruin – and Daryl had to wonder if it was something that had happened on the job, or something in his life at home. Shane wasn’t with him that day, but he had sat at the back table they usually occupied, so maybe the other man was meeting him there. It was a Monday, too, so the change in schedule also threw Daryl off. What Daryl wouldn’t give to have the man sitting on a bar stool, in close proximity, so maybe – just maybe – he’d open up, and Daryl’s constant curiosities would finally be eased just the smallest amount. They clawed at his chest, filling his thoughts until they were all consuming, and he had been getting so easily distracted by the ideas.

But now, worry was over-taking that wonder fueled mostly by a schoolyard crush on the gorgeous man. Daryl had chewed on his thumb more times in the past 40 minutes than was probably strictly sanitary; Dale would have his balls in a vice if they got a health code violation over something as stupid as Daryl’s nerves. But damnit, he was actually concerned! The apprehension was buzzing through his limbs akin to the alcohol he poured for the men at the corner of the bar top, and it was making him just as numb and inebriated as if he had been doing shots with them. Hell, he might buy himself one just to calm the fucking nerves – because he wanted to go ask the man if he was okay.

Daryl was used to people coming in to drown their sorrows, crawl into the bottom of a whiskey glass to escape whatever problems plagued them outside the double doors, but it was the first time the man had walked in that way. A polite nod in his direction with a strained half smile that didn’t fit his face, and a quiet “no” when Daryl had reached for the fridge door housing the bottled beer. “Whiskey, two fingers, no ice,” he had drawled, tired and sad, and Daryl knew he looked confused at the request. “Please,” the man had continued, holding up a ten, and trading it for the glass Daryl poured with another small nod. Then he had retreated, not asking for another, but also not really touching the glass beyond the first sip or two.

Daryl would know, he hadn’t taken his eyes off of him the entire time.

It probably wasn’t work – Shane would be there if it was, Daryl assumed – unless it was so bad the other man had gone to the gym to take it out on the machines there. He had heard the other man talk about it a week or two before, how since Shane had started going his aggression wasn’t as bad, with Shane nodding in agreement and then going off with a bright smile about all his weight stats Daryl didn’t give two shits about. Too focused on the shape of the other man’s mouth, the blue of his eyes, how his hair was starting to get a little longer and curl at the nape of his neck.

But even if it was work – Daryl bet the man was good in a crisis, could prioritize and keep his head, knew what needed to get done before anything else. So what could have happened that would cause such a look of numb devastation to cover his features? Maybe something on a large scale, more than man versus man, like a bad wreck or a house fire – something akin to a force of nature that one would have to just hold on and wait for it to be over, pick up the pieces once it was done. He looked like a man who was good at that, picking up the pieces, trying to mend what had been broken. He just needed to be pulled out of the fog of misery before he too crawled into that glass and couldn’t climb back out.

Pale blue eyes found the bottle fridge once more, hands clenched at his sides to keep from gnawing on his fingers again, but that didn’t stop Daryl from worrying his lip with his teeth. He wasn’t sure he could make himself do it, he wasn’t that type of person – he wouldn’t call himself _shy_ but he certainly wasn’t outgoing either. He couldn’t just walk over and strike up a conversation, couldn’t casually go over and pretend to be cleaning tables and just ask if he was okay, but he had more tact than to just shout at him from across the bar. Hell, Daryl wasn’t sure if he could talk to the other man at all, his throat closed up at just the thought of being under that” intense blue gaze. He wasn’t going to be the one to pull the man from drowning inside his whiskey glass, he didn’t know how to be that person.

But he couldn’t watch the other man fall apart in the corner of the lonely bar in the early afternoon light, like the tragic stories of his usual patrons - that became so one with the bar they started to match the furniture.

So with shaking hands, he grabbed a cold Budweiser from the fridge, twisting off the cap with his calloused hands, and made his way out from behind the bar. He could faintly tell he had a bar rag stuck in his back pocket, and his jeans had rips in the knees, the tattered hems tied to his ankles with bandanas so he wouldn’t trip over himself behind the bar. And he had stacked kegs earlier from the shipment for the week, Monday night football about to hit them in a few hours with the force of a hurricane, so he tried not to worry that he smelled like sweat – or preen that his arms probably looked good after the small workout – and instead approached the man’s table as calmly as he could. Though his heart was about to beat out of his chest, so he knew he had to make it quick before he did something dumb like stumble or choke on any words that tried to escape his throat. As he slowed to the table, the other man still not seeing him, he set the beer down with a clink that echoed in the quiet bar, startling the man to look up.

Wow his eyes were blue, clear as the fucking summer sky on the ocean, and the surprise chased away the dark and sad tints that had been clouding his features for the better part of an hour. And just for that, the vice on Daryl’s chest loosened the tiniest bit.

“On th’ house,” he told him quietly, holding back the wince at his low, gruff, pack-of-cigarettes a day backwoods drawl, and instead turned and made his way back to his post behind the bar. Trying to hide his flushed face with his long hair, and busying himself with digging through his tip bucket for the cash to cover the bottle, ringing it up with his employee discount just for good measure. He knew he wasn’t supposed to, but Dale could suck it if he had a problem with it. Because when he finally turned around, the man was sipping on the beer – looking ten pounds lighter – with the half finished glass of whiskey pushed to the other end of the table.

And that was worth it, the small smile on Daryl’s face kept just to himself as he continued setting up the bar for the night.

\--

It was later that night, when everyone had their drinks and the game still had 10 minutes - his bar top full and all the tables surrounding it filled up, everyone’s eyes trained on the flat screen above the liquor shelves - that Daryl thought back to what could have bothered the dark haired man so much he had been reduced to day drinking alone.

A news spot flashed during a commercial break, highlighting a fourteen car pile-up on the county border, with ten people confirmed dead and more than twenty injured. It looked brutal, and a low whistle to his right had him humming in agreement. “Hate to be on duty for that call,” one of his regulars, Bob Stucky, said empathetically into his glass of Hennessey. The flashing lights on the television had Daryl wondering, had the sheriff’s department been called? Probably, he bet the man and Shane had been there, helping pull people from cars – dead or alive – and weaving through the mayhem of burning machinery and spilled gasoline. Daryl could practically see it, and knew without a doubt that the man had kept his head high and his shit together, didn’t let himself fall apart until he was off duty and could hide away in a little hole in the wall where no one would judge him.

Except apparently Daryl, who was bordering on stalking with how intently he had been watching the man the past few weeks, and at that he felt a little awful. He could’ve let the man be, let him settle into shock and deal with it in his own way, and with that he began to wonder if he did more harm than good distracting the deputy from his whiskey glass. But he had looked better – a small list to his lips that could’ve been the smallest traces of the smile Daryl had memorized from across the room.

Oddly, though, the concentrated frown that creased his features when the man was thinking hard about something, careful and precise, also fit him so well it set something alight up Daryl’s spine. A line of fire that had Daryl staring more than he really should. It only happened once or twice in the bar, before too many beers, lining uphis shot and aiming for the dartboard, or speaking in low hushed tones with his patrol partner about something at work.

It was then that a scene set in his mind.

That careful precision, blue eyes intense and unblinking, taking in the surrounding chaos that mirrored the clips on TV, an 18 wheeler on its side surrounded by parked cars that weren’t able to go anywhere. The white noise from the bar becoming the chaos that filled the area on the freeway next to the gas station where the accident had occurred, so loud it blurred until it was deafening silence. And all Daryl could see was the man, full sheriff’s deputy uniform, picking his way through the wreckage in the heavy silence that shouldn’t be surrounding such chaotic scenery – and it was so vivid, so startlingly _real_ in that moment, that it hit him with the force of a semi truck. He wanted to remember that image, he didn’t want to lose it, let it slip through his fingers and become another metaphorical novel that sat collecting dust on the shelves of his mind – vague and never quite what it was when he first imagined it.

Without another thought, he spun and snagged a pen from the register and a bar napkin, and started scribbling notes – words – until the words became phrases, phrases became sentences, and his chicken scratch was barely eligible to himself he was writing so fast. But he wasn’t used to writing his thoughts out, his hand couldn’t keep up with the images in his head, and he had barely gotten the bare basics down on the white square napkins before someone was shouting at him for another beer. Looking up, glaring at the man for making him lose his train of thought, he saw the game was over. Everyone had scattered across the room now instead of crowding around the flatscreen, and three people were nowhere to be seen, either out having a cigarette or just walking out without paying their tab.

Goddamn it!

With a heavy aggravated sigh he kicked at the sink in anger, got the disgruntled patron his beer, and went to tack up the receipts that were unpaid – just in case the assholes actually grew a conscience and came back to settle them.  The rage bubbled slowly like boiling water under his skin, turning his mood sour and the frown on his face borderline hostile. Until he saw the three bar napkins sitting on his register full of his scribbled handwriting, and the boil turned to a simmer, a small piece of mind settled that he wouldn’t lose the image he had created in his head.

But – what was he supposed to do with it now?

\--

Daryl didn’t reread the napkins until after everyone was gone, his regulars having to be pried from their bar stools with the jaws of life, old Doc Greene needing to be woken up from where he had fallen asleep in the corner over his rocks glass. Sgt. Ford even offered to buy him a shot if he let them hang out a little longer, but Daryl led them out with a huff of laughter around the cigarette between his teeth, smoking it outside as he made sure the ones walking went in the right direction and the ones he deemed able to drive had some form of wits about them as they pulled out of the small barely-lit parking lot.

He put on some music that suited him better than the usual dribble Dale played, and got all the chairs off the floor to sweep it, letting the sink run hot water into the ice well to burn what was left over. He had closing down to a science, seeing as he did so five or six times a week, so when everything was cleaned and wiped down, dark wood polished and all the glasses hand washed and back on their shelves, Daryl retrieved the bank drawer from the register and made himself comfortable at a table to start counting it up. But he also brought over the napkins, wanting to re-read them, see if he could make sense of what he had furiously scribbled – hoping he had been able to at least grasp the image enough that he could reimagine it.

It shouldn’t have surprised him that he _could_ , reading the little phrases that turned into full sentences. Or – really one run on sentence, he was pretty sure some of those commas should be periods, but it’d been a lifetime since his last English class. But it was vivid, he used a lot of… crap what had that old bat teacher of his call it, imagery? He compared stuff a lot, turning the image of devastating wreckage to a patchwork of his own life experiences to create such a vibrant scene that it was almost as if Daryl was standing there with the man. Watching him try to make his way through the landscape of abandoned machinery, silence pressing in heavily from all sides. Why had he written silence? If it was a wreck there should be screams, sirens, chaos in a blur – there had to be other people there. But Daryl hadn’t written any, just the man, alone in the wreckage. Why was he alone?

He contemplated it, chewing on his thumbnail without even realizing it, asking himself all these questions as he read what he wrote. He hadn’t ever really thought of himself as a writer, though if he had to pick one thing he had enjoyed about school besides auto shop class it was when they got to write whatever the fuck they wanted in English. That old bat, Mrs. Cloyd, she had always had a soft spot for him – actually let him pass with a decent grade so he could graduate – and even though she got frustrated that he could never turn a damn thing in on time, when he finally did she always had this look on her face that was sad and kind and also impressed. Though Daryl didn’t know what ‘impressed’ looked like at the time, 17 and not knowing much beyond the edge of the forest and the end of his daddy’s belt, so he had shied away from her when she tried to reach out to him. Now he regretted it, because he would probably know what to do with the scraps of flimsy paper in his hands with the beginning of _something_ written on them if he had let her.

Daryl’s pale blue eyes skittered across the bar, eventually looking over his shoulder and seeing an old yellow notepad that Dale used to count inventory, and it took him a few minutes to get himself to stand up and go grab it. It felt strange in his hands, the battered pad of tinted paper, empty lines in blue only scoured by some water marks left in droplets along the edges of the top page, a few cursive scribbles on the first couple of lines obviously written by Dale. He stood there looking at it for far longer than was probably necessary before he tore the top page out and set it where the pad of paper had been settled between the wall and a bottle of Jack Daniels.

He plopped back into his seat, the drawer of uncounted cash forgotten on the other end of the table, and the three napkins settled beside the notepad so he could see them. Daryl read through what he had scribbled carefully, that scene circling in his head as the words “silence” and “sea of cars” and “burned wreckage” jumped from the page as if they were highlighted. The imagery painted in words that showed the man he had been staring at for weeks, road weary and a little battered, in his uniform trying to make his way through to the –

Gas station. He had scribbled it at the top, indicating where the wreck had been located. Daryl’s eyes skittered between everything, and that same question flashed like a neon sign at the forefront of everything.

Why was he alone?

Why was it so quiet? Where was everyone?

And then he knew the answer, the words coming to him in a voice that sounded a little too much like the man with the piercing blue eyes, deep Southern drawl spoken low and quiet.

They were all dead.

His pen was on the paper now, writing out the scene as best he could, stumbling over his phrases and using too many commas in each sentence. But it painted itself, his own words and descriptions creating what was becoming a dark and desolate view into a world that the man could wear like a second skin.

_“The patrol car pulled up to the empty intersection, battered and covered in dust, driving through ~~the empty intersection where~~ where the traffic lights remained blank, and parked next to the over-turned 18 wheeler surrounded by abandoned cars, same as he’d been seeing for miles – for days…”_

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm almost in tears you guys, thank you so much for all the wonderful comments and kudos and subscriptions right out of the gate. I'm so excited that there's interest in this fic and I can't wait to hear what y'all think of the parellels with the show and all the easter eggs I have scattered throughout. This is honestly a joy to write, I have to again thank my dear friends at the RWG and my lovely betas MaroonCamaro and Ijustwantedyoutoneedme who patched up all my mistakes and helped keep me sane. I hope y'all enjoy this next chapter, it's a fun one :3 and I can't even begin to list all the name dropping for products and brand names and things I don't own. Some quotes are taken directly from the show and I especially don't own those. Thank you again for reading :)

\--

He hadn't meant to write zombies.

Hell, that little dead girl appeared out of nowhere, popping into his head and appearing on paper just as quick. After the man shot her in the head – devastation a shocked and intense expression that flooded his face and eyes, and something Daryl had never witnessed and hoped he never would – he had to drop the pen. His hand _cramped_ at how much he’d written, there were four pages of solid writing. The quiet and nerve-wracking walk that just enhanced and expanded the destruction that surrounded the tapped out gas station lasting longer than he expected, and even Daryl hadn’t known it was going to be that bad before he wrote it. The scene almost wrote itself.

But _zombies_?

He’d come up with some weird stuff in his head before, but it just felt so… cliché. The idea stale and almost expected, definitely overdone, which left him feeling a little disappointed.

Except at the same time it didn’t, as Daryl read through what he wrote, it had a different air to it than all the B-horror movies that aired late into the night around Halloween. Something more real, less slasher film, the horror of it missing the aspect that said “holy crap the dead have risen” and instead whispered “am I the only one left?”. And he liked that. So, only a little apprehensive, Daryl had held onto the short beginning he’d written for the sheriff’s deputy that frequented his bar, coveted it and thought about it constantly. How did he get there, what was he doing, what had happened to him so far? What had happened to the world?

His Netflix history at home soon filled with awful movies and over-rated blockbusters alike, along with a few gems hidden in between, and some old classics – all related to the zombie apocalypse. Because although his survivor skills were something he could boast about, Daryl didn’t know a damn thing about zombies – except they fucking ate you. But if the world ended? If the dead won and destroyed civilization and left it crumbling and rotting just like the bodies that ambled the streets? That was something to think about, sink his teeth into and wonder how the people in his little suburban town would make it when everything went to hell.

And soon it was all he thought about.

\--

The damn beer cooler broke on a Tuesday morning, all of the contents a lovely room-temperature when Daryl got there around noon to help open the bar up, and he promptly let out a string of curses and kicked the stupid machine so hard it sputtered one more cough in an attempt to start. And died.

It was just pre-cut fruit and some mixers at the bottom that were probably spoiled – the cream for Dale’s White Russians, open jars of condiments and vegetables for bloody marys, and the whipped cream containers were probably all useless now too so he’d have to 86 a few drinks – but it was still a pain in the ass to get everything out and take the fucking thing apart. Daryl ended up filling the ice well half way and setting all the beer in it to cool for the patrons that would be showing up within the hour wanting one, and let Dale take over bartending for a bit so he could try and fix the damn thing. Of course, they got busy on the one day that something broke in their antique-furnished shit-hole of a bar.

It was as afternoon was turning into evening when Dale told him to just give up, Daryl having spent the past few hours on his hands and knees taking apart different areas of the fridge to clean it out and hopefully make it functional again, that he stood up and saw who was actually sitting at the bar-top.  Dale had set himself up at the end, inventory spreadsheets and business paperwork covering the area where a group of college kids usually chilled and drank pitchers of beer loudly until a little after 10. Daryl had thought it was quiet for 6 pm, but he also had his head down and had been quietly cursing the fucking makers of “ALAMO” who probably went out of business around the time of Manifest Destiny according to the layers of dust on this piece of crap machine.

The college kids had migrated to the pool tables in the back, out of respect for the older man, so at least they had that bit of sense about them to respect their elders. But the pool table was Shane and his partner’s usual spot, so now for the first time they were actually sitting at the bar - by Dale’s work area, a few empty seats in between to give the business owner a sense of privacy.

And when Daryl stood up he was suddenly assaulted by two pairs of eyes looking right at him, paired with a smirk and a small smile.

“Well look who decided to join us,” Shane laughed around his smirk, downing the last of his beer and exchanging it for the full one Dale had just poured. “You give up on it?” His teasing tone helped break Daryl of the stupor he had been in because of the man with the blue eyes – who was still watching him, acknowledging him silently while nursing his Budweiser bottle. Daryl snorted, looking down shyly, trying to find something to say but was having problems being in such close proximity with the man that had been at the front of his thoughts for weeks. Almost months now. God, had it been that long?

“Think it’s time ta put it down,” Daryl mumbled, using his old shop rag from Jim’s auto-body place to rub the grease and grime from his fingers. “Been battlin’ with it all afternoon.”

“Yeah we can see that,” the other man drawled, his small smile teasing but his voice so much more pleasing to hear than Shane’s. Daryl couldn’t tell if Shane was making fun _of_ him or just poking fun in general, he was too used to Merle whose joking was always laced with insults. But the other sheriff’s deputy was more companionable, and it helped ease some of the tension between his shoulder blades. “You got the blood of yer enemies all over your hands and face.”

Shit, of course he had something on his face.

Now accompanied with an embarrassed flush, Daryl whipped around to use the reflection in the glass fridge to try and see how bad it was. There were grease stains on his forehead and nose mostly, probably from pushing his hair out of his face, and a smudge of something dark on his cheek, and he tried to get the spots but mostly it just made everything worse.

“Well that just made it worse,” Shane parroted his thoughts with another bark of laughter, causing Daryl to huff in frustration and turn to glare at the other man.

“It’s fine, don’t worry about it,” the other man told him reassuringly, still with a smile and a laugh of his own, but Daryl still tucked his shop rag in his back pocket and ducked out from behind the bar to go scrub at his face in the bathroom. The last thing he wanted was an entire evening of looking that man in the face and wondering if he was actually looking back at _him_ of if he just couldn’t help looking at the grease all over Daryl’s face.

When he came back Dale was hard at work catching up on everything he missed while he had been bartending in Daryl’s stead, and Shane and his partner were deep in conversation. Shane looked like he was trying to cheer his partner up, while this distant look of trouble had settled heavily across the other man’s features. Something obviously bothering him, and though Daryl wanted to ask he knew it wasn’t his place. So he went about loading up the bar for the night, trying his best to prep without the use of a beer cooler, and pretended to not be eavesdropping on their conversation.

“What's the main difference between men and women?” The man finally asked when Shane’s many turns of topic weren’t sparking anything in the other’s clear blue eyes.

“This a joke?” Shane asked in return around the lip of his beer glass.

“No, I’m serious.”

“…Never knew a woman who knew how ta turn off a light,” Shane started after a moment of thought. Once again changing the topic slyly, and Daryl found himself a little surprised. Shane Walsh was that kind of guy that usually rubbed Daryl the wrong way, not only that Alpha Male type that always had something to prove in one way or another, but he also had that “Good ‘Ole Boy” atmosphere around him that Daryl had grown up with. It made his skin itch, bringing up bad memories, but now that he was around people more – immersed in the masses and learning different facets and aspects of each person -  he was becoming more accepting than he used to be. Learning the similarities and differences of every person, that stereotypes were made for a reason but people didn't follow them most of the time, and judging someone based on first impressions was the worst mistake anyone could make. Shane Walsh was a little full of himself, would fight you to prove he was right, and could be arrogant as fuck – but he also knew the difference between right and wrong, upheld his standards with an ironclad resolve, and was a good friend. Daryl could see that as he told some bullshit story (that could’ve been true, but more than likely was just made up) to get a smile out of his patrol partner, made him laugh a few times, chased away whatever was bothering him.

And when he was done, he eased back to the topic and got his friend to speak about what was wrong without it becoming awkward.

Daryl couldn’t tell if he was more impressed, or more envious.

“So how’s it been with you and Lori, man?” Shane said when he finished his story, aiming for casual.

“She’s good, she’s good at turning off lights,” the man laughed, and it didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m the one that sometimes forgets.”

As much as Daryl stared at the man, the shape of his mouth, the colors in his eyes, the expressions that lit up something in Daryl and made him want to _know_ the other man so much more than the casual strangers they had become – he would never wish the situation the man then described on him, or anyone for that matter. Told in such detail it was painful to imagine. He poured his soul out to his friend and drank more beers than he should have, with the bartender lurking and listening intently to every word. It spoke of an impending end that was almost inevitable, and even though that would make this wonderful gorgeous man _available_ , it hurt to hear. Marital problems weren’t something Daryl knew a lick about, and neither did Shane it seemed, but he tried to listen and sympathize. Tried to give input.

“It’s like she’s pissed at me all the time, and I _don’t know why_.”

“Well – do you talk? Express your thoughts, shit like that?” Shane was trying, at least, which made Daryl cut a glance at him from under his bangs as he cleaned and polished the glassware.

What he saw made his hands stop moving.

He had been bartending a while now, had gotten to know the type of people that wandered into a place like Dale’s. The regulars were easy, the ones who were sad and angry could be spotted a mile away, the groups of friends that met up to get wasted migrated from place to place thankfully – and then there were the couples. People didn’t have _dates_ at Dale’s, not the kind where they blushed and stumbled awkwardly over each other, it sure as shit wasn’t a club to pick up a one-night stand, and if they were married they didn’t stay out late enough for Daryl to pay attention to them. The only couples that flirted and got too close to each other, drinking so much every ounce of guilt that showed in their eyes when they entered could be chased away, were the ones that weren’t supposed to be there in the first place. The ones that usually had someone else waiting at home for them.

He knew what that looked like, the traces of shame when you did something you weren’t supposed to, that betrayed trust. It wasn’t always when they were cheating on someone, some had that look when they saw the time was longer than they were supposed to be gone (probably having lied about where they were), or when they made a fool of themselves after drinking too much. Old Doc Greene had that shame in his eyes too often, each time he drank from a glass, and it always made Daryl want to snatch it away and tell him to go home.

But once again it wasn’t his place.

So it wasn’t his place to even notice the same little glints of shame hiding in Shane Walsh’s eyes, or to try and figure out what that meant. What he was hiding. Daryl had an inkling, and it made his blood boil in anger. He hoped to God he was wrong.

“You know what she said before I left this morning?” The man was almost leaning his head on the counter, which Daryl wasn’t allowed to let people do, but he couldn’t have interfered now if his life depended on it. “’Sometimes I wonder if ya even care about us at all.’ She said that in front of our _kid_ , imagine going to school with that in your head.” Daryl knew more than most what it was like to go to school with awful things in his head, things from home, and he felt more for that little kid than he would like to admit. His skin crawled with it, and he shifted uncomfortably at the thoughts, the raised marks on his back suddenly burning like brands beneath his T-shirt.

“The real difference between men and women,” the man said with a newfound sense of anger. “I would never say something that cruel to her, especially in front of Carl.”

Daryl swallowed hard, doing his absolute best to _not_ look at the two men at the bar. He was delving into something he had no right to, he shouldn’t be listening to this, and he defiantly shouldn’t be logging it away in his head. He didn’t want to, but he knew this conversation was going to come up when he got home. Those four sheets of paper sitting innocently on his kitchen table, just waiting for him to continue the story he had started. It was written down, something physical and concrete, and it was _his._ He needed a computer, had even thought about getting one just so he could type it up, but God – this wasn’t fair to the man whose name Daryl still didn’t even _know_. What was happening at his bartop was too real, too personal, and knowing so little about the man except for what he’d observed as he basically stalked him the past few weeks was going to lead to every little thing being written into it. He shouldn’t write what he just heard, felt a little sick that he had even considered doing so, it wasn’t his story to tell. He had no right. No matter how it made him feel to put those thoughts to paper, to create something that was his and his alone, and how it felt to explore this fantasy world for the nameless man that made him _feel_ too much. That it was Daryl’s only way to get closer to him, not able to say more than a few words at a time in his presence, and turning his mild attraction into a full blown crush so fast he hadn’t known what hit him until it was too late.

Fuck, it was already too late. Had been for a long time.

He should quit now, while it was still new and nothing had come of it yet – before he got more attached than he already was. Who was he to think he could actually _write_ something? And what the hell was he supposed to do with it anyway?

The man sighed heavily, closing his blue eyes that were clouding over the more he drank, his full lips became looser and his expression sadder the longer they went on. “Ever since I woke up-“

“Rick, man, you gotta give yourself a break,” Shane told him earnestly. “You got shot, brother, and you were out for three months, we weren’t sure you were going to wake up at all.”

Daryl’s brain short-circuited.

He dropped the glass he had been polishing, the rocks glass hitting the tile and shattering into jagged pieces, Daryl barely able to say “Fuck” and scramble down to pick everything up before the two men had trained their eyes on him.

“JOB OPENING!” Some asshole shouted from the pool table, and Daryl gave them the finger with a very angry and embarrassed glare directed their way.

“You okay?” The man- _Rick_ asked him, straining to see behind the bar from his seat.

“Y-Yeah, ‘m fine,” Daryl mumbled, thankfully getting down to the ground so he didn’t have to look at the other man’s face because he knew his was bright red and looking really angry in that moment. “Just – slipped.”

His ears burned, heart hammering in his chest, thoughts whirling so fast as he carefully picked up the broken glass that everything else returned to white noise. Even the sound of Shane and _Rick_ resuming talking – this time without the tense atmosphere. Daryl dropping the glassware seeming to shake _Rick_ from the sad train of thought that was making him drown in his beer bottle.

And it had derailed Daryl’s as well.

His name was Rick.

In all the fucking _weeks_ that the two sheriff’s deputies had been coming to his damn bar, Daryl had never heard Shane call the other man anything other than “brother” or “man” and occasionally other nicknames depending on the conversation. Never once had he said _Rick’s_ name, not within earshot of the bartender; it appeared to be a habit saved only for the serious conversations – when he wanted to say something and really be heard.

Daryl could wring his fucking neck for that, because it had been driving him crazy not knowing the man’s name.

Rick.

It felt so easy, like Daryl should’ve _known_ that was his name, even though there was no possible way for him to do so. It fit him, which was also a dumb thought – no one really _looked_ like their name.

But God, he couldn’t stop hearing those words.

Rick.

_“Rick, man you gotta give yourself a break. You were shot-“_

Holy shit he’d been shot.

Daryl jerked his head up to look at the man – Rick – again, the other words besides his name coming to him slowly. But harshly, like punches to the face, as he fucking _remembered_ hearing about that incident. The car chase that ended with a deputy being shot and hospitalized, it had been all over the papers and the news stations, Merle had heckled the story like no one’s business when Daryl visited him that week. How the pig probably fucking deserved it, and if any of those assholes in the car had lived they would’ve been treated like kings up in County. Daryl had agreed with a strained look that might have been a smile if he knew how to make one, a huff of breath that was as good as a laugh, and hadn’t thought about it much past that.

Sadly, neither did the news.

“- _you were out for three months, we didn’t think you’d wake up at all.”_

Daryl had to step outside after he threw away the glass, smoke a cigarette or _three_ to calm the shaking of his hands, Shane’s voice repeating in his head over and over and _over._

His name was Rick, he’d been shot, he’d been in a coma for three months.

Rick’s wife and son had been alone for three months.

Shane had a secret.

_Fuck._

Scenes flashed before his eyes, so distracted by the possibilities, the continuations from the short story he had written of just Rick alone trying to get gas in a world full of the walking dead. Why had he been alone? He had been looking for his family – he had to be, with how he talked about his wife and his kid constantly, they were always at the forefront of his mind. He was a family man, and in that moment the story being written in Daryl’s head over-powered any pangs in his chest at the fact that his unrequited crush would always be just that.

Because Daryl also knew without a doubt that if Rick had been unconscious in that hospital bed when the world went to hell, and there was no way he would make it out alive, that Shane Walsh would have taken care of his best friend’s wife and son like they were his own.

His heart beat madly in his chest at the thought, at the string of thoughts that knit together so quickly all he wanted was a pen in his hand flying over the notebook he was about to jack from Dale and getting everything out on paper before he fucking _forgot it_. It was such a crazy idea, but it _fit_ them, even if Shane hadn’t cheated with Rick’s wife – if they had been just good friends while Rick was in a coma and then suddenly there was news reports everywhere of people being eaten. And the National Guard was flooding the streets of Atlanta, highways were backed-up like in the movies, maybe they bombed the cities like in _Resident Evil_ and _28 Days Later_. It would be scary as shit, and Shane would fight for them, keep them safe – he seemed like a resourceful guy, could handle his own. Daryl bet he would make it.

But Rick… how would Rick survive? He’d still be in the hospital…

Daryl’s eyes got wide, the cigarette caught between his fingers and lips for so long he burned himself – hissing in pain and dropping the smoldering embers. But the thought went round in his head, round and round and round – all night long. After Dale snapped at him to come inside, after he got busy at the bartop dealing with the hassle of the damn college kids who had too much to drink. Again. And after Shane and Rick left around closing time like normal. Both of them waving at him, leaving the same generous tip they always did for keeping their beers bottomless all night long and then letting them hang out to sober up.

This time Daryl tried to say something – he knew Rick’s name. He knew Shane’s name too, but he wasn’t sure they knew his. Dale didn’t make them wear name tags or anything. So Shane saluted him, a little more buzzed than Rick, who still kind of spun and pushed the door open with his back and smiled loosely at Daryl on his way – feeling way better than he had earlier, going from a sad drunk to a happy one that made something inside Daryl’s chest melt. “G’night,” he called to Daryl, who was busy scrubbing at their glassware, his last few before he could wipe everything down. Daryl had been so stunned by the sight, smile lit up like the Georgia sun on Rick’s face, that he almost missed him as the man kept moving with the door.

“…Night-“ he managed as the curly haired man disappeared out the double doors. “- Rick.” The name sounded strange on his tongue, his own backwoods accent and gruff voice making it a low spoken thing, said into the silence with such a roughness and solidity that it felt like a swear word. Taboo for him even to say. They were never introduced, he just heard his friend call him by name.

But he was never going to fucking forget it.

Or the idea he had scribbled on a square napkin with a sharpie, the words short and barely a sentence - but they stared back at him all night, just sitting on the register blaring at him like a neon sign. Sending waves of fresh inspiration every time he saw them, read them, new vivid images in his head that he didn’t have time to get down all night. But as soon as he got home, he would. He had so much to tell about the man named Rick who was about to own the apocalypse like he was _made_ for it. And it was all going to begin with six small words.

_Rick wakes up in the hospital_


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You all rock, seriously I can't tell you enough <3 more thanks to Ijustwantedyoutoneedme and MaroonCamaro for making this readable and being absolute angels, and dealing with my crazy ass. This chapter is still chock full of direct quotes, show refrences, and things I don't own (like Google and Netflix) as well as a refrence to a movie that I'm shamelessly obsessed with. And for anyone who reads my other long fic, Southern Discomfort, I recycled Daryl's hometown as White Oak, Georgia. Except in this fic White Oak will be a little town in the sticks just south of Atlanta instead of down in the swamp.

\--

The words poured over the lines on the notepad Daryl _did_ end up stealing from the bar, flowing from hand to pencil as swift and smooth as water over rocks in a stream. But the words that ended up on the pages were not as tranquil, they were everything but. Shane and Rick’s conversation ended up in the story following where Daryl left the sheriff’s deputy, after he shot the zombie girl, deciding to backtrack and start from the beginning. Suddenly depicting seedlings for something that made his stomach tie up into knots, but not as much as the car chase that followed. His brother, for all his illegal activities, was addicted to ‘Cops’ – which was the dumbest fucking thing on the planet in Daryl’s opinion. But as a result, Daryl had been forced to watch enough episodes that he got the general gist of how everything would go – except that it ended with Rick getting shot.

He hit his first snag when he realized that Rick would have a bulletproof vest on under his uniform if he was involved in a high-speed chase, something he felt a little weird knowing while being on the other side of the law. Daryl _might_ have Google-searched bulletproof vests on his phone and points of weakness, in a last ditch effort to somehow make his idea work. Which probably wasn’t the smartest thing he could’ve done with a last name like Dixon, and the long list of rap sheets connected to it. If he wasn’t flagged before he probably was now.

He also may or may not have searched news articles for the shooting and learned Rick’s last name was Grimes, because that wasn’t creepy at all. Or that he was researching how to shoot the man without killing him.

There was a point under the arm that could be accessed if someone had impeccable aim or some incredible luck, and with that in mind Daryl wrote a false alarm shot that had Rick’s blood pumping _“Did you see that? That son of a bitch shot me!”_ and a chance while pointing at Shane _“You don’t tell Lori that happened, ever.”_ for the bullet to pierce through him. Daryl got a little lost in the action, the details, the little things that probably didn’t matter that much, but they popped in his head so he wrote them on paper. And soon he had pages upon pages torn out of the pad and stacked on top of each other.

Early morning sunlight had started to shine through his single window in his one-bedroom apartment, brightening the room and matching the fucking birds chirping outside his window – those damn birds, they always made him want to use his crossbow on them at 5 am when they started their insistent calls and chirps. He used to be a morning person, rose with the sun as a kid before anyone else in his house would wake, but now that he worked at the bar he was forced to become a night owl and slept during most of the day due to his constant string of closing shifts. So the damn birds chirping, which used to work like an alarm only more pleasant to the ears, were now like nails on a chalkboard and he wanted to cause some gratuitous violence to nature each time he woke too early. But _this_ morning he had been hearing them for quite a while, or must have and just not paid attention since it was near 7 in the morning and Daryl was still writing.

Because Rick had woken up in the hospital.

It was such an inspiring thought, it made his heart race because he knew what that meant – even though in his story, Rick did not. How he woke sore and in pain, too much beard on his face, dehydrated as fuck and trying to talk to Shane – the last person who visited him. Only to find the flowers on the table long dead, his IV drip bone dry, and the clock on the wall had even stopped. Rick walking through the disaster zone of a hospital had been easy to write, hospitals creeped Daryl out to no end anyway, so every little thing he wrote that would make him uneasy went into the description.

It was getting too early, and Rick was still stuck inside, navigating the halls as best he could in his horrified daze  – God, Daryl wanted to write faster so he didn’t lose what ideas he had. The images that flashed were too intense, too vivid, and he needed to get them down. Inspiration was not something Daryl was familiar with, at the time he didn’t understand this urge that made him stay up all night long and write run-on sentences and references from his life into a patch-work fictional story about the guy he was crushing on trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. That wasn’t _normal_ , who does that?

Daryl’s vision started to go blurry a little before 8 am, so he finally dropped his pencil and cracked his fingers and knuckles one at a time, surprised at how stiff they were. Even rotating his wrist got a pop that was immensely satisfying. He left the page where it was, still half blank, and picked up the mismatched stack of paper where he’d been tearing out the pages to write on the back when he’d finished the front. The stack also included his first four pages of what he’d written before he knew Rick’s name, and combined it was a lot more than he thought there’d be. He slowly counted each page, and muttered “holy shit” when he got past ten. There were 16 in total, 16 fucking pages of a story that was way too fun to write. Why else would he be doing this? It’d been a while since he had this much fun doing something that didn’t involve adrenaline and shooting animals in the woods so he’d almost forgotten what that felt like. But now that he had them – and knew he wanted to continue but didn’t know where _else_ the story was going to go – what the fuck was he supposed to do with it?

That thought bothered Daryl more than he wanted to admit, but he pushed it down, the need for sleep finally taking over and making him drop his written beginning back on his kitchen table. For the time being, anyway.  Right now, he was going to do nothing with it, except get out what he fucking wanted to. He had the next night off so he was going to write this if it killed him, just to get it out of his system, because the story was all-consuming and he couldn’t _think_ of anything else but Rick _fucking_ Grimes in this zombie-filled wasteland he’d created for him.

But beyond that, Daryl didn’t have a damn clue what he was doing.

\--

Two weeks later, much to Dale’s dismay, Daryl requested a day off. On a Monday, meaning T-Dog would have to be called in to take over for him – but since Daryl had shown up to every shift he’d ever been scheduled _ever_ , there really was no reason Dale couldn’t give him a day off.

Because he had decided over the weekend what he might want to do with the stack of paper that was steadily growing the more he worked on it. He’d finally written Rick out of the hospital, vibrant depictions of wrecked hospital halls with lines of bullet holes in the walls, blood splattered in every corner, and the fucking cafeteria door. That had been something that came to him _as_ he was writing, which was cool when he started to write it and got the image not premeditated, sparking something that could have been a smile at the corner of his lips if he hadn’t been too distracted by the thought. “DON’T OPEN, DEAD INSIDE” written in dripping letters, with chipped and pale fingers trying to reach through the small opening in the door that was chained heavily. It was like something out of a video game, maybe he could do something like that with it when he was done with it.

If he ever got done with it.

It had hurt Daryl more than he thought it would to have Rick go home, to the house he pictured the man having back when he first started staring at him across Dale’s bar. White picket fence and a yard, window shutters that weren’t falling off the frames or in pieces, paint that wasn’t chipped, storm drains that not only functioned but weren’t rusting apart. Such a vast difference from the only house Daryl had ever lived in, but just like every other cookie-cutter suburb he’d seen on TV. Except this one was empty, and Rick was screaming for his wife and kid, eventually looking at his hand and trying to decide if this was even real. Begging himself to wake up, before he finally went outside and sat on his front steps, trying to collect himself.

Daryl felt for Rick in his story, he’d been in a similar situation before – though he had been much younger, and there hadn’t been a house to return to. Just the smoldering ash and unstable frames of what had once been the house he grew up in. It had been terrifying not knowing where his brother or his parents were, only to find out later that his Mama had been inside when it burned to the ground. Wasted on wine, and trying to smoke in bed still woozy from a concussion, though that part wasn’t in the coroner’s report – couldn't report bruised skin if there wasn’t any left.  Those few days had been surreal and devastating. It was hard to prove everything was real even when life was screaming it in his face.

So he translated that as best he could, had it so Rick still didn’t understand that the animated corpses were just that – dead people that were somehow still moving. An abomination that shouldn’t be regarded with confusion and reckless lack of caution, though as stunned as Rick was and still weak from just waking up he’d need someone to help him realize what had happened to the world.

But who would do that? In a world where it was a fight for survival, who would extend a hand to a stranger like that – Daryl knew that was what was needed, but he couldn’t for the life of him give a reason anyone would help the man sitting on his front steps in a hospital gown. Eyes red from crying and just watching a creature that should be dead stumble towards him in a stunned state of confusion.

No one Daryl knew would do that.

He stopped mid-sentence, staring at the pad of paper, and tried to think of all the people he had surrounding him in his life, the ones who had extended hands of help to him when they really didn’t have to. Because everyone he had known growing up, his family, his hometown, no one would have given two shits and would probably have just left Rick there to get torn apart by the stray zombie. But Daryl had been slowly meeting people that would look his way, who saw a person instead of a burden, and he tried to track through his encounters with those people instead of the tainted and hostile ones of his life before he moved to this town. There was Dale of course – when he didn’t have any form of job experience that was documented, and Jim for the same reason – Daryl didn’t have a rap sheet, but he knew he looked like trouble. Back when he was a teenager there were some teachers from the county high school who had a fleeting thought to take a chance on the white-trash kid with bruises, and some neighbors now who were either too dumb to recognize the details that his life had left scarred into his skin – or just brave and kind enough to not be scared of him. There had been a few strangers who were like that too, or who didn’t know any better –

That was it.

That was Rick’s key to living through that first morning outside the hospital.

Daryl didn’t know the kindness of strangers growing up, or living with his brother, his whole demeanor screamed danger and read like dictionary definitions for criminal activity, and most people in his hometown had known him by reputation. Consequences of having a last name like Dixon in a town of barely 300 people. So no one ever offered assistance, wouldn’t want to be caught helping a Dixon kid or end up being sorry for it later after taking a chance on him. If it had been anyone _but_ Daryl then they were probably right to shy away, no one knew his family better than Daryl did, so he had learned to live with it. To deal with the hostile reactions and sneers and cold shoulders, he was fine on his own anyway.

But he remembered the first time it was introduced to him.

Not long after he’d gotten the job at Dale’s bar, before everyone knew better than to pick fights with him, some jackass fucked with his bike while leaving the bar. And by fucked with it, he meant the asshole _really_ fucked it up, as in Daryl got maybe two miles away before it sputtered and screamed at him, causing him to pull over on the side of the road at three in the fucking morning in the middle of nowhere. There was little to no light way out there, so even holding the flashlight between his teeth was not helping him see a damn thing on the backroad that apparently had the fewest amount of streetlights possible.

One or two cars passed him without pause, one even honked at him for being too close to the shoulder – to which he gave them the finger as they drove away – so there was no chance for help and he’d have to trek all the way back to Dale’s bar and either spend the night in a booth or call his boss and ask for a ride. He had just started the job at the time, so like hell he could afford a taxi. It was as all this was running through his mind, brows furrowed in anger with a scowl formed around the flashlight in his mouth, that he noticed he could better see the damage on his bike because an approaching car had stopped right behind him.

To say he whirled around expecting a fight would be an understatement. Everything he had learned growing up had taught him to do so, but he hadn’t expected to see a man with a calm face and kind eyes step out of the truck pulled up behind him. Or for his son, who must have only been eleven or twelve, to hop out of the passenger side.

“Did’ya break down?” the man called, he wasn’t smiling at him but his face showed a kind of amusement that was quiet and accepting, peering at him in the bright headlights. Daryl felt a little bad that it struck him first that the guy was black, his brother’s voice echoing in his head with all sorts of insults and comments and insinuations that their kinds don’t mix. But why would this guy stop for him in the middle of the goddamn night, with his _kid,_ if that were true? Daryl wasn’t his brother, or his Pa, and it took a minute of long silence for him to entertain the notion that – maybe he wasn’t his last name either.

“Yeah,” he eventually muttered, an answer but kind of a dumb one. The guy just nodded, and his kid inched forward in the headlights, soaking in the sight of the motorcycle in all its shining chrome and gleaming metal parts. “Think someone jacked wit’ it, won’ go anywhere tonight.”

The man finally reached him, nodding and appraising the broken bike – though he probably didn’t know a damn thing about them. Finally looking up and catching Daryl’s stare, a kind crinkle to his eyes as he gave him a sympathetic smile. “Tough luck, you just get off work?” Daryl nodded, having to tear his eyes away and look at the ground in order to continue this non-conversation. But that was how he saw the man extend his hand. “Morgan.”

Daryl’s head jerked up, knowing his eyes were blazing in confusion, but the man was nothing if not patient, and waited until Daryl took his hand and shook it. “Daryl.”

“That’s my son, Dwayne,” Morgan pointed to the boy who was still gawking over the bike, now ignoring the adults almost completely. “Dwayne!” The boy snapped back, looking at them with wide eyes before he shot over to them and held out his hand too.

“Hi, sir,” the kid’s quiet voice sounded nervous but polite, and it threw Daryl once more. So much so he didn’t know he hadn’t said anything until Morgan continued.

“Let’s load up yer bike, we can give you a lift.”

He hadn’t know Morgan or Dwayne, hell he didn’t even know if they lived in these parts –he hadn’t seen them since that night many months ago – but he would never forget what they did. It was a pivotal moment that made him contemplate how he acted around people, how close he had been to snapping at the man in anger – who would have probably then just loaded his son up in the car and not given Daryl a second thought – but instead he had taken a chance and met someone who was showing him kindness just because he _could_. It was something Daryl had never encountered before, they didn’t know him as a Dixon and probably didn’t even know what that meant. He was no one to them, just some guy on the side of the road.

Rick would just be some guy on his front steps, he would be no one to someone too.

He could be no one to Morgan and Dwayne.

If Morgan knew he wasn’t a zombie and wasn’t bit, Daryl bet that he would help Rick. Help him understand and help him through that first night until it all sunk in.

And then, Daryl knew – without a doubt – that Rick would shake it all off, and jump in feet first. He’d help Morgan and Dwayne in turn, and together they’d make a plan. They would have hit it off, Rick and Morgan, they had the same kindness that Daryl almost couldn’t comprehend.

Almost.

Before he knew it Daryl had written the entire interaction out, had created a story for Morgan as well, a kind man with sad eyes now that the world had ended – his boy’s life forever changed – and whose wife had been bitten and turned. It was Daryl’s first chance at dealing with someone who had known one of the deceased that walked among the living, and it took him some time to piece together what that would feel like. It was pretty typical, really, and Daryl felt a little injustice on Morgan’s part – because his grief was not something Daryl would understand, though he tried through many movies on his Netflix list. Daryl could only compare it to if his brother was bitten and turned, and that thought alone was something that scared him beyond belief, he’d never want to see Merle with dead eyes and flesh caught in his teeth. Daryl had no problems with death, he understood it better than most, but putting himself in that place where the dead returned into lifeless monstrous shells of what they used to be terrified him on a level he wasn’t sure he wanted to focus on too closely.

So instead he focused on Rick, who would see people first instead of zombies, who would go back for the girl that was just a torso and arms and a gaping mouth, crawling through a field of grass because _something_ wouldn’t let her give up. Kept driving her, and would not let her stop, despite her torn decaying flesh and nerve endings that must have been on fire. That made her want to consume and eat whatever was near though she had no stomach. It was a hell that was unimaginable, and it shocked Daryl so much to write he had to stop a few times – in need of a shot because _holy shit_. A zombie apocalypse story should _not_ be this intense, or this personal. But Daryl was pouring everything into it, every bit of him that he had to offer, all his memories and experiences – and those around him as well. It was so overwhelming at times he had to pause, take a breath and resurface from this world he created. Because it was getting too much to deal with on his own.

Which was why he needed to do something with it. Anything, it was just becoming too big.

The only person who had ever given him guidance (or tried to) on a subject like this was that old bat Mrs. Cloyd. His old High School English teacher. She hadn’t _really_ been that old, and when Daryl looked up the high school website on his phone, sure enough, there was a Ms. Cloyd teaching junior and senior English classes. She had to be pushing 90 by that point, how the hell was she not retired? But ultimately Daryl was grateful, because now he had _someone_ out there that he could ask questions about this thing he was creating, he just had to go home to do it.

And going home was the problem, because Daryl had vowed he would never step foot in White Oak, Georgia ever again – for as long as he lived.

It was that Monday morning when he asked off from work that Daryl climbed on his bike – always fully in good repair, Daryl had taken care of _that_ problem early on in his career as a bartender, no one messed with him or his property now – and made the long trek home. White Oak was way down South on the other side of Atlanta, the highways were always blocked up so it was usually deterrent enough to never get _close_ to his old hometown, but he left at a decent time to avoid any kind of rush hour. The city melted away to rural suburbs and specklings of forests and farm fields dusted along the highway, so green in comparison to the little dried up suburban town he lived in now on the North side of the city. It smelled amazing, the fresh air and the vegetation, dirt and gravel dust, with the hot Georgia sunshine blaring down on him as he flew down the open highways.

It was one small slice of freedom before he had to take the exit into the most suffocating ten blocks in the whole state. White Oak, Georgia. Small town U.S.A.

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MaroonCamaro and Ijustwantedyoutoneedme are the bookends that hold my life together. Seriously. I'd fall apart without them. Thank you again for reading and commenting and I hope you enjoy this chapter as much as the last few. Rick isn't in this one but we do meet a new/old face and I sneak in more refrences I hope make you smile :) I own nothing and I am absolute trash, this fic highlights both those facts so damn much it physically hurts me - but I hope you like it.

\--

It took every bit of Daryl to turn off onto the backroads and not drive through town, where his winged vest would be recognized like a homing beacon, because he wanted to get to the school as fast as he could and the winding gravel roads were going to take twice as long to get there. The town was so small it shouldn’t have mattered much anyway, and Daryl kicked himself with each sharp turn that sprayed gravel like shrapnel into the tall grass – because he really shouldn’t have worn his vest. It was Merle’s vest, really, from the biker gangs he associated with. But everyone knew Merle Dixon was in jail, would be for a while, so the white angel wings that were a mockery in symbolism – painting him as a mercenary for hire to all who saw him – now meant nothing but a strong reminder that his brother would always have his back. Just wings and no patches now meant “back the fuck off” to any gangs that may have seen him riding on the highways around Atlanta. But to their hometown, it meant one of those damn Dixon brothers was back and about to raise all kinds of hell.

Daryl would have to lose it before he got to the school, or tried to go inside.

He did just that before the roads changed from gravel back to paved asphalt, shucking the leather vest and folding it up into his saddle bag before taking off up the hill towards his old high school. Another place he had promised he’d never return to – not after the years he had to spend there. But this return wasn’t something that was going to hurt as much as taking the highway exit that pointed towards White Oak, Georgia.

Cross Keys High School was the largest and most poverty-stricken rural high school in the area, right on the edge of DeKalb County outside Atlanta, and having almost seven different towns feed into the large estate. The bus ride alone was almost 20 minutes from the trailer park Daryl had lived in after the Dixon house burned down, thankfully on the other side of White Oak and so far out of his way Daryl didn't even have to get a glimpse of it. The school itself looked like a prison, just without the barbed wire and guard towers, the actual chain-link fencing wrapping around the football and track fields all the way to the back parking lot. It was always the road Daryl took when he ended up walking after missing the bus, sometimes on purpose just to get away from people for as long as possible, so he took his bike up the steep inclines that led around to the school and weaved through cars that littered the mostly empty rows of parking spaces.

It was about a half hour after last bell - if he remembered right -  when Daryl pulled up to the front of the school and parked in the visitor area, a place he never really viewed when he attended years and years ago. He only received a few weary looks, but he thought he had looked decent enough to be let in a high school after hours, especially one like Cross Keys. He had a plain black T-shirt on, this time with sleeves, and jeans that didn’t have too many holes or tears in them, though the worn dark leather jacket probably was what was earning him all the uneasy stares. Daryl tried to fix up his shaggy hair a little bit, make it look less wind-swept messy and more presentable, before taking the immediate left once inside the front doors toward the office. After passing through the metal detectors that guarded the doorways – they didn’t have those back in his day.

Luckily he had made enough effort to call ahead that morning, so there was a sticky-note on the secretary’s computer saying he’d be coming, making it very painless to sign in and stick a visitor sticker on his jacket before heading down the empty hallways. If the older woman behind the desk raised a penciled eyebrow at him for sticking it on his arm instead of his chest, he didn’t pay her much mind as he failed at smiling at her and nodded his thanks with a quiet murmur as he exited.

Everything still smelled the same, which was weird – it had been near two decades since he had last entered the halls. Fuck he was getting so damn old. Daryl shoved his hands in his pockets to keep from chewing on his nails nervously, shoulders hunching defensively as he took in the combination of narrow and wide hallways, littered with lockers and bulletin boards and the constant rows of closed classroom doors. He passed a few adults that must have been teachers trying to escape the school as quickly as their students had not too long ago, but they didn’t pay him much mind as Daryl followed the direction the front desk secretary had given him. All the way to the back, last hall on his right and two doors down, 127. English hallway, just like it had been when he was seventeen and scared to death of this school and all the people in it.

Though he had never admitted that.

High school was not a time Daryl liked to remember. He didn’t have any friends back then, the only assholes he ever hung out with were associates of Merle’s and he didn’t like talking with them at his house let alone on school grounds, but he had to try and have some form of backup when he was there. The name Dixon brought a lot of trouble, almost as much as it alleviated any kind of help he may have needed in the hallways, navigating them akin to picking through a war zone depending on who he crossed. Daryl preferred his senior year more than any other, because he got to be invisible for the first time in his life. Everyone already knew not to mess with him, and most didn’t consider him worth the effort to reach out to anymore, only once or twice had the fact _no one saw him_ hit him hard. Standing in the middle of a crowded hallway with faces passing and going on with their day and classes without even _seeing_ him, no one noticed – even when he had black eyes and walked with a limp, because Merle was deployed and Daryl was left alone with his dad again – and even if the ground had swallowed him up everyone would’ve just kept on walking. He blamed those panic-stricken moments on just being a stupid-fuck teenager, those fleeting thoughts that hit harder than they should, but he always got over them. Face stuck in a perpetual state of anger and discomfort, making sure everyone stayed far away from him, and somehow he survived four years there. Somehow he fucking graduated, actually had a degree unlike Merle and his Pa and his Uncle Jess. He didn’t walk, though, just picked up his diploma at the front office and left without looking back.

The only reason he graduated at all was because of that damn old woman, Ms. Elaina Cloyd, who had thought she’d seen something in him all those years ago and – despite the exasperation that he couldn’t find it in himself to _try_ – gave him endless amounts of second chances until he passed by the skin of his teeth. He was a little glad he got a chance now to thank her, properly.

Room 127 was the only door in the whole hallway that was still wide open, the sounds of someone moving around inside making Daryl falter his steps for a moment warily. Fuck he still didn’t know what to say, how to start, and the folder (that he also jacked from Dale’s office) with his futile attempts at writing inside burned like a hot brand under his arm. Daryl breathed deep, let out a long sigh through his nose, and made himself walk to the threshold of the door.

Only to find a young woman trying to put a stack of papers in her already overflowing accordion file, strands of blonde hair escaping from her ponytail and falling into her face despite her glasses. She looked up when he didn’t say anything, round face a little flushed in embarrassment for her struggles, and was soon talking to him before Daryl could get a word out – though he didn’t know what he’d say in his surprise besides ‘sorry’ for interrupting her or ‘who the hell are you?’

“Can I help you?” she didn’t have a Southern accent, it sounded oddly Midwestern and out of place this far Southeast, and Daryl had to make himself answer when her nervous twitches started to bleed over to him as well.

“Uh – I think I’m in the wrong room,” he answered gruffly, slowly, looking around but not seeing a name anywhere in the room or on the door, just the number 127 blaring at him. “Lookin’ for Ms. Cloyd’s room?”

“Yep, that’s me, Miss actually but yeah you’re where you’re supposed to be,” she rattled off, before looking a little unsure. “I think. I don’t know you do I?”

“Nah,” Daryl shook his head, narrowing his eyes at the girl who was _way_ younger than him. “Ms. Cloyd’s like 80-somethin’, you can’t be her.”

Recognition crossed _Miss_ Cloyd’s face, looking a little taken aback and then suddenly more sheepish than she should be in a tough school like Cross Keys. “I’m Denise Cloyd, you must be thinking of my grandma – Elaina Cloyd, I took her spot here not long after she retired. She’s the one that got me into teaching instead of finishing medical school, too many anxiety attacks and I couldn’t deal with the blood and the – I’m sorry, you don’t care. Um, did my grandma teach you here?” Her quick movements with her hands and stuttered ramblings both wracked Daryl’s nerves and held them in place, having someone more nervous than him in this situation throwing him off and making him lose his center. So he pretty much just stared, partially glaring, at the young woman who was still trying to _help him_ despite Daryl standing there like an idiot in the doorway with all the social graces of a fucking fence post.

He managed to nod, looking over his shoulder like he could make a quick exit and not have to deal with this anymore. The old bat was retired, as she should be – fucking 90 years old, why did he think she’d still be there? He wasn’t going to get any help here.

“She passed away a few years ago,” Miss Cloyd told him, an accepting look on her face that had a sorrowful air to it, showing she had moved on a long time ago. “I’m sorry, if you wanted to catch up with her or anything.” Daryl ducked his head, feeling bad because _he_ should be the one saying sorry and not the other way around, but all he could think about was how he had come all the way back to fucking White Oak, Georgia and brought up all these memories he’d rather have forgotten – for _nothing._ The folder under his arm was now uncomfortable and he couldn’t help fidgeting with it. “What’s that?”

Daryl grew very still, hand holding onto the folder like it was a lifeline that was about to be snatched away from him, and felt his hackles begin to rise a little defensively. “Nuthin’, sorry to have bother’d ya,” and he had turned away to flee down the hallway when the young woman jolted forward.

“Wait!” Daryl froze in place, hiding behind his bangs and a whole body flinch ready to be unleashed if she tried to _touch_ him or anything like that. Fuck he just wanted to leave. “You – you obviously came here for something,” she pointed out, nervous but blunt and not afraid to cut through Daryl’s bullshit. “Is that it? In the folder.” She had a quiet authority, that only looked meek, and had Daryl stepping into the room as she gestured with a hand to have him give it to her. It took him a moment to stop clutching the stupid blue folder in his fist, probably wrinkling the pages within, before he outstretched his arm and offered it to her. Miss Cloyd plainly saw that Daryl wasn’t much of a talker, or was used to his odd behavior from the kids in her classes, and just took the folder and opened it with no hesitation.

It was honestly the most nerve-wracking moment of Daryl’s adult life.

Her eyebrows rose to her hairline as she skimmed the chicken-scratch sprawled across the pages, seeming to get a few sentences in before she looked back up at the quiet man standing in her classroom. “What is this?” she asked again.

All Daryl could respond with was a shrug, knowing his face was probably heating up and that he was very obviously not looking at the young woman, despite her eyes being trained on him from behind her glasses. He didn’t need to see the judgment on her face, the confusion or even laughter. This was something to him – though Daryl couldn’t explain _what_ , there weren’t enough words in the English language for him to even try – and it was personal and he hated having it in the hands of a stranger who wasn’t going to understand. Why had he even come here, what did he hope to hear that would give him some direction to keep going. To keep telling a story that he not only had no right to be telling, but no reason.

“It’s good.”

His head snapped up, bright eyes startled and set right on the woman, who he hadn’t even noticed was looking back at his writing and had continued reading it.

“Whatever it is,” she added with a smile. “Is it a novel?” she took the folder with her to the desk in the corner of the room, pulling up a chair without looking away from the page and setting it next to her larger one in front of the computer. “It’s too many words for a screenplay, what do you do? Write storylines for TV? Or video games?” Daryl had followed her, trailing behind like a lost duckling because – she had his story, he couldn’t fucking leave now. He kind of wanted to snatch it back out of her hands before she got to the zombies part. But her questioning his occupation made him falter in his steps, hesitate in sitting down in the chair she pulled out for him, and made his words stick on his tongue.

“I’m a bartender,” he finally mumbled gruffly, seeing her skeptical look and returning it with a glare that wasn’t as heated as his normal ones. The genuine surprise on her face when Miss Cloyd realized he was being serious took Daryl aback too, and suddenly they were blinking at each other, even the English teacher at a loss for words. “I-“ Daryl tried to start, made a scoffing noise and leaned away in the chair from the young woman still staring at him, having to clear his throat. “I came here ta talk to Ms. Cloyd, ma’am.”

“Denise is fine, you’re older than both my brothers,” Miss Cloyd said with a nervous smile, seeing her interruption had thrown off Daryl’s momentum and lapsed the man back into apprehensive silence. She looked apologetic, having to clear her own throat and find the right words to continue as well. “What did you want to talk to her about? This story you’re writing?”

Daryl made an affirmative noise, still lounging in the chair but leaning away from her, once again chewing on his thumb but trying to appear more nonchalant than anxious. The nervous energy of Miss Cl- Denise clashed with his own apprehensive panic, and it was almost as if they canceled each other out. He felt the tense worry that had been constricting his chest and lungs like a vice lessen with each passing moment.

“Where did you get the idea? Is it supposed to be anything in particular?” Daryl just shrugged again, wishing he could get over this damn shyness and just say what he had come there to say. But he couldn’t get himself to say anything, the words just weren’t forming on his tongue – and he had once again been reduced to his teenage years where he communicated with pointed glares  and noncommittal noises. Until his brother had come back from overseas - with a dishonorable discharge of course – and had required that Daryl start speaking up for himself in the traditional Dixon way. With sharp words and scarred knuckle fist fights. Though Daryl’s insults tended to have more pop culture references than his brother’s racial and misogynistic slurs – not many knew what “On Golden Pond” was, but it rattled people all the same when he had shouted at the old man that owned the corner store near his house. Merle had been proud at the discomfort his outburst had created. The Dixon family rage was infamous after all, handed down from Father to First Born Son to Baby Brother. No one had expected any different of him, anyway.

“Well it’s good, just needs some editing. This is your first draft I can tell, you sure like commas don’t you,” she said teasingly, with hints of fear that she might offend him lining every word. Daryl felt his face heat up in embarrassment, he knew he wasn’t good at this writing shit – hell he didn’t know sentence structure from a goddamn physics equation, and his word choice had to be the level of a second grader. It all felt like gibberish sometimes, when he read over it – he might as well have been trying to write it in Spanish. But Daryl felt like he _liked_ what he was writing, just that there was something he was doing _wrong_ as well. And he had hoped his old English teacher would be able to shed some light on what might be holding it all back.

“Tell me about it.” And suddenly he had Denise’s undivided attention, and Daryl’s normally narrowed eyes went wide, staring back in a startled panic. “It’s alright, just – tell me how it started?”

Daryl was quiet, he had enough self-control to not let his hands fidget, though he still chewed on the inside of his cheek. He wasn’t sure where to even start without sounding like some kind of stalker, the little jabs T-Dog would throw his way good-naturedly suddenly ringing in his ears menacingly. “There’s this guy,” he heard himself drawl quietly, rough voice low and spoken slowly, until the words started flowing and he couldn’t seem to stop. “He comes ta my bar twice a week, wit’ his patrol partn’r.”

His quiet little tale of inspiration, hitting him like a freight train and staying so much in the forefront of his mind that he couldn’t help but put pencil to paper, spilled from his lips in scattered phrases and embarrassed murmurs. But there were moments, sparked with excitement and something that bubbled in his chest that felt a little too much like pride, that flared when he talked about how the story progressed through the bits and pieces of his life – and he tried to tamper them back when he noticed what he was doing. The young teacher didn’t need to hear him _brag_ about what he was doing, and being so excited about something he had made all on his own felt too much like endorsing himself for Daryl to be comfortable with, so he stamped on those sentiments whenever they snuck into his words. He was pretty sure Denise noticed, which was more embarrassing than anything, but the quiet smile on her face was more amused and endeared than taunting, and that helped more than any words could ever express.

“I jus’ – I don’ know what ta do with it,” Daryl told her in confidence, having stopped leaning away from her while he told his story and was now leaning his elbows heavily on his knees – raking his fingers through his long locks and keeping his eyes averted as much as possible. “I’m just writing. It’s starting to become somethin’, and I don’t know where it’s even going.”

“You don’t have to,” Denise finally spoke, reassuring and soothing as a balm over Daryl’s rattled nerves. “This,” she gestured to the stack of pages on her desk. “is just the beginning, you seem to have a lot more to say. So until you get more out, just keep letting the ideas come to you. And focus on improving what you have, you mentioned you thought it was missing something?” Daryl nodded at her, watching the young woman thrive in her role of guidance from behind long dark bangs, she practically vibrated with the need to help – to lead Daryl in the direction he was searching for so desperately. “It’s really not, in my opinion, but I think what you want is some kind of polish? I have a lot of things that can help you; books, worksheets, handouts with guides, whatever you need. Daryl –“ she leaned forward as well, getting closer to his level and making sure those pale eyes were trained on her honest hazel ones, gleaming behind her glasses.

“What you’re doing is really good,” Denise told him earnestly. “I know it feels strange to incorporate all these different aspects of your life, but that’s what all writers do – because it _works_. Yeah, if you ever do anything with this you’ll have to change the names of people and places,” and Daryl couldn’t describe how much his stomach dropped at that. He couldn’t imagine the man in his story as someone named anything other than Rick Grimes. “-but that won’t be for a long while now. So write it as you have been, these people you know – they are your inspiration, and you’re creating something incredible with it.”

Daryl wasn’t used to praise, to constructive comments that were used to help a person grow and better themselves, all that had been hurled at him his whole life were insults. Any praise had always been from his brother, connected to violence and destructive tendencies that left scars too deep to ever heal, so he knew he was shying away from this hopeful person that was just trying to help. He had come there for help, had braved his distant memories and harsh reminders of who he would always be no matter how far he ran, and had come to the one place he had seen hope as a kid. A stupid kid who didn’t know acceptance when it was staring him in the face, just as it was in that moment – in a room so much like the one he stood in almost 20 years ago when an old bat of an English teacher tried to breach the hard protective shell of a scared white trash kid from the boondocks. He wasn’t going to let that go twice, second chances weren’t something that ever happened to a Dixon, so Daryl knew better than to let it slip through his fingers again.

His face was heated and his expression a confused sort of anguish, from not knowing how to deal with the words spoken to him, and teeth once again tearing at his thumb in careful thought – but Daryl eventually nodded at Denise’s sincere offers, making a broad smile cross her face as she jumped to her feet and started digging through her files.

\--

Traffic backed up all the way to the sticks by the time Daryl made it out of Cross Keys High School, his folder of writing now stacked on top of a couple textbooks and a few packets and handouts all freshly printed from Denise’s computer. Information overload making his ride back to the city a buzzing blur to the point he had barely focused on traffic signs, until he was stuck in a standstill between two very large SUVs and a semi-truck. Which was making him very nervous as it idled next to him with a turn signal on, trying to merge into his lane once the cars started moving again.

Daryl heaved a heavy sigh, arms outstretched on his brother’s old low-rider and hands twisting at the handles nervously, caught in a revolving door of remembering everything Denise and he had talked about, and the claustrophobic feeling of standstill Atlanta traffic jams. There were a lot of tools for Daryl to go through for what he’d written and fix it up so it was more to his liking, some books on writing and planning so maybe – just maybe – he could start coming up with an endgame to this story. Get his main character actually _going_ somewhere, because Daryl was getting the feeling that he wasn’t going to make Rick wait long to find his family in the story. But then what? Once Rick found his family, however he found them – because Daryl hadn’t even come up with an idea for _where_ Lori and Carl and Shane had holed up as the world fell apart. If they had found some people that were level-headed and kept together, strength in numbers and all that, someone like Dale and Jim and a few other world-worn people that were good at making things work. Once Rick found them, what then?

With the slow move of traffic Daryl let the loud motorcycle roll forward the 15 yards that were allowed, finding a gap he could weave between to get him out of the hulking shadow of the semi-truck. The tires were about as large as his fucking bike, he did not want to get run over because some dick couldn’t check his side mirrors. He weaved between a few lanes, impatient cars honking at him and his intrusion but he got ahead a good quarter mile before he was stuck again. The guttural bass of the bike thrumming through his whole body as it idled in the late Georgia sun, stuck in the far right lane where everything moved ten times slower. He could see the signs for the city now – and wished he knew this side of Atlanta better, now that he was trapped during rush hour, unsure if there were some side-roads or another route that would get him back to a familiar setting. His phone’s GPS was shit so he never used it, and his fingers drummed on the handles in agitation as he considered giving it a shot.

There were some signs and billboards lining the interstate that he looked over lazily, half his thoughts on how to get out of the fucking traffic jam and half on his lack of plot in his story, until one sign up ahead caught his eye. Squinting at it in the low summer light behind his cheap Ray-Ban knock-offs, Daryl could vaguely make out a picture of a building he had passed by a dozen times on the highway – but had never been to before. Fuck what was it called, it was large and modern looking, recently renovated and all over the damn news spots when they played between the games on Monday nights at the bar. The light blue and white lettering was hard to make out at that distance, but as traffic inched forward at the pace of a snail on sedatives, eventually he got close enough to read “Atlanta Center for Disease Control and Prevention.” Fuck that’s right, they’d been doing fundraisers and shit every other week, Daryl had snorted at it more than once – and the pretty lawyer with the gorgeous dark skin and dreads (who considered Dale’s bar the one damn place in Atlanta her associates couldn’t find her on Wednesday nights) had spoken of a few galas she had been invited to for it. An aspect of society Daryl was not familiar with and never would be, and that suited him just damn fine.

_Center for Disease Control and Prevention_

He mulled it over in his head, chewing on his lip until a horn sounded behind him and he was jerked out of his daze – seeing a good 20 yards open in his lane. He moved forward, making a gesture of apology to the mini-van behind him but not bothering with anything else as he got stopped again once he closed the gap. And then the words were stark and legible and blaring at him not too far from where he sat.

He hadn’t even thought of that, what society would do in the face of a zombie apocalypse – besides scramble and scream.

All Daryl knew was the lower class, knew the people who would get run down and eaten first off – and the ones that would pack their shit, loot what they could, and get the fuck out of town. Bury themselves in the woods like ticks and defend what little scrap of land they wanted to call their own. Try to ride it out. The middle class he was also more familiar with now than he used to be, his patrons and the people who occupied the little suburban town he lived in now – the people of Buckhead, Georgia would turn to whatever authority figures they could and follow them blindly like sheep. The police, the armed forces, whoever had a sense of security that took the decisions out of their own hands and let them panic as well. But there were also intelligent ones hidden in that group, that were smarter than that – and would try to use what resources they could to survive whatever was thrown at them.

But he hadn’t thought of the people who had the opportunity and the tools to actually _do_ something. This apocalypse situation he made was something that someone – somewhere – would dissect and try to understand. For every 10 people in the world that would give up on life in the face of whatever troubles were thrown their way, there was at least one that would fight tooth and nail against it. That’s what humans were good at after all, enduring, adapting and finding a way to make it despite all odds. So there had to be at least one person who worked at a place like the CDC that would say “fuck this shit” and try to find a way out, a cure, something to end whatever was destroying the world. Daryl would bet his life on it.

Would Rick?

If it gave him even the smallest glimmer of hope, Daryl _knew_ he would.

While all the sheep were slaughtered and joined the ranks of the dead, the survivors and cowards alike would leave the city in droves, backed up and stuck just like Daryl was in that moment in a rush hour traffic jam on the outskirts of Atlanta. The smart ones would abandon their cars, like they did during the winter when the roads were too slick and dangerous to drive, creating a graveyard of parked cars. Except this time they would all be leaving the city, no one would be trying to enter it. Just one side of the highway bumper to bumper with rotting cars and scattered dead bodies.

Only a select few would be crazy enough to _enter_ the city after that, for supplies maybe – once the chaos had died down and they were just trying to wait it out – anyone who lived through what would probably happen in a big city like Atlanta would avoid it like the plague. Would be cautious, careful and quiet, the streets would be filled with zombies with how many people lived there. Daryl bet the military might even bomb it if the infestation was bad enough, invade and patrol it, turn the streets in between the skyscrapers into a war zone. Until the dead overran everything in sight like a plague of locusts, and turned the metropolis into a disease-ridden husk of what it used to be.

Rick wouldn’t know that though.

He’d stroll on in with only a minimal amount of worry, as if walking up to knock on a stranger’s door. That bag of weapons on his back that Daryl had written about the night before, dressed to the nines in his old Sheriff’s deputy uniform that Daryl knew every detail of like the back of his hand, like something out of an Old Western.

Hell, he could even be riding a horse.

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long chapter is long, my brain is on fire from the busy weekend I had cause I'm so tired but the chapter is ready. It is one of my favorites, the most parody-ridden so far. Mucho thanks to the two lovely women in my life Ijustwantedyoutoneedme and MaroonCamaro who beta'd the monster below, though I'm afraid my sanity is leaking out my ears at this point so I hope all their effort wasn't for naught XD I'm delirious, ignore me, I hope you enjoy reading this chapter as much as I loved writing it. <3 (Maroon gets double kudos for all the car knowledge and wisdom she bestowed upon me C: thank you dear)

\--

Daryl was fucking stuck.

He’d written himself into a corner, and couldn’t get himself out, and had spent _three days_ agonizing over how the fuck Rick was going to survive this place he’d put him in. Rick had ridden into downtown Atlanta on the back of a horse, John Wayne style, and while it had been quiet and deserted with just a few straggling dead ones, he’d run into a whole bunch of them – hundreds, and even the horse couldn’t outrun them. The struggle that followed flowed so hectic and fast that Daryl knew he was dropping words left and right to just get the images on paper, from the horse falling and being torn apart by nails and teeth alike, to Rick firing into the crowd of corpses and scrambling to escape by crawling under a tank.

There was no exit for that, and Daryl had known that before he even started writing it, but he’d had a backup plan in place. Dale watched the History Channel while he worked during the week, just something to keep on as background noise while he puttered around doing various things around the bar. So usually, when Daryl was done with all his opening duties and chores, he’d find himself paying attention more than once to whatever program was on. And just last week there had been a special on WWII tanks. They had a hatch at the bottom, for escape when the tank was under fire, which made an idea spark out of fucking nowhere. Daryl had been sitting at the bar with his head on folded arms, watching the special lazily, when it hit him. He lifted his chin in careful thought, his eyes narrowing at nothing in consideration – before _sprinting_ to his bike for the notebooks he’d bought. Dale’s notepad was long gone, all used up and torn apart with every single page filled out, so Daryl resorted to wandering into the school supplies sections at Walmart and buying way too many spiral notebooks – they were cheap as shit so that helped a bunch. Easier than buying a laptop, that was for sure.

But he’d had the thought that – if the soldiers could escape out of the tank from that hatch, and had left it open in their haste, then who’s to say that Rick couldn’t escape the swarm of zombies by escaping _into_ the tank?

Rick had almost given up, surrounded by clawing hands and gnashing teeth beneath the tank, gun to his head to spare himself the same fate, when he saw the hatch above him – and Daryl had him inside safely. But every outcome after that just led him to one dead end after another, first firing the shot inside the tank momentarily leaving him disoriented, to closing the top hatch to keep the more mobile zombies from getting in. And now – Rick was stuck, sitting there, sweat rolling off him and out of breath, out of rounds for the Colt Python and just a single clip in his stolen handgun, and the bag of guns out on the ground. With no one around - no one alive, that was - and no chance of getting out past the hoard that was clawing at the outsides of the tank. But at least it was a tank, they wouldn’t be able to break through. So that just left Rick to sit there and die of dehydration and starvation. Awesome.

His day off was Sunday, and Daryl was not ashamed to admit he used up way too much data on his phone Google-searching how long someone could survive in a tank – and the amount of search results had been surprising. There were a lot of stories, a lot of historical sites, and a lot of possibilities and situations to choose from. But in the hot Georgia sun? Never once had there been a tank in the streets of Atlanta, Georgia. It would take a zombie apocalypse for it to happen, it seemed, so his stats were completely off and he had to look through weather reports and compare them to Desert Storm and it was a giant pain in his _ass_. His phone bill was going to be so large he might as well have bought the damn laptop! His cheap little Roku was already wired to his neighbor’s internet, bless her – so he couldn’t ask to borrow her wireless connection, and more than once he’d ridden his bike to the nearest McDonald’s just to borrow theirs. But now it was 8:00 on a Sunday night, and Rick was still stuck in that damn tank, and Daryl was fucking stumped and frustrated and he wanted to punch something. How the hell was Rick going to get out of the tank without help?

Aggravated and starving, Daryl just gave up and ordered a pizza because fuck everything he wasn’t going to figure it out that night, he’d binge on Netflix and pray for some kind of inspiration to hit him – because once again, who the hell would help him even if they did see Rick climb under the tank and then lock himself in like a dumbass?

\--

He was halfway through an episode of _Life After People_ when there was a knock on his door. At least something was working out for him, unlike his damn story. The kid with his pizza didn’t even blink at his ratty jeans and faded t-shirt, hair a mess from how many times Daryl had drug his fingers through it and _pulled_ in frustration – but he must’ve looked a little angry when he ripped the door open, because the Asian guy took one look at his face and almost physically backed away. Ducking to hide his face behind his baseball cap and looking anywhere else before rattling off his order to make sure he’d gotten the right apartment. Daryl heaved a heavy sigh, dragging his hand down his face for the fucking hundredth time that night, feeling how he’d given his own skin stubble-burn from how much he’d scrubbed at his cheeks and chin in thought, before trying to school his features into something less homicidal. Wasn’t this kid’s fault he was a shit writer, or that he basically killed his main character before they’d even gotten out of the gate.

“How much, Short Stop?” Daryl grumbled in question to keep his pizza from running back down the hallway, and he tipped the young guy almost as much as the damn pizza cost in apology for scaring the shit out of him. He looked like he was in college, the kid probably needed it if he was delivering pizzas this late on a Sunday, and it had gotten there pretty fast anyway. The guy had looked at him in surprise at the amount handed to him, not expecting Daryl to say “keep it” while kicking the door shut in his confused face. Maybe that would give him some good karma and he’d actually write himself out of the hole he’d dug Rick into.

Despite how many hours he’d wasted already trying to figure out a solution.

He’d only just sat down on his sunken couch - so close to the ground his legs were near past his elbows - with the pizza box open next to the pages he was starting to loathe with all kinds of hateful passion when he heard a knock on his door again. A glare turning his narrow eyes to slits as they snapped to the closed door, half a pizza slice in his mouth. Who the fuck was that?

It really shouldn’t have surprised Daryl that the person knocking was the pizza delivery guy - he was the only one who’d knocked on his door in the past month - but his wide nervous eyes still took him aback a minute. Enough for him to not care that he was still chewing on his pizza with the crust in one hand and the doorknob in the other, totally prepared to slam it again if needed.

“Uh… sorry, it’s just- my car won’t start?” the kid said quickly, looking a little too scared of a guy with no shoes and his cheeks so full he probably looked like a chipmunk. “And no one’s answering me at work and neither are my roommates because they’re assholes obviously, and I got to get moving and deliver this stuff or I’ll lose my job and is – is there any way I could get a jump?” He swallowed thickly after he ceased his rambling, looking like he regretted a lot of personal life decisions that had led him to that moment while Daryl continued to stare at him and, well, finish chewing his pizza for one thing. Contemplating his next few options, even though it was pretty damn obvious what he was going to do with the kid who had enough balls to disturb anyone at this hour, and possessed some kind of faith in him that was enough to come knocking on his door and ask for help. The kid was doing a good job not averting his eyes this time, though he still looked scared shitless that he might be wrong about the scruffy redneck, and that notion was enough to give Daryl pause in the silence that stretched between them.

“Please?”

And that was how Daryl ended up out in his apartment parking lot with no shoes on at 9:00 on a Sunday night, pushing a little POS Toyota over to his brother’s rusted red pickup truck that had been in the corner of the lot since the last ice storm. He never touched it except when it was too cold or slick out to ride his bike, luckily it was Georgia so those days were few and far between, but he hoped the damn battery was good enough to jump the kid’s car at all. He honestly couldn’t remember the last time he’d even driven it, let alone popped the hood.

“Ya gotta steer it!” he snapped at the kid, who obviously hadn’t done this before at all, and Daryl was doing most of the pushing while the Asian guy tried to steer it in neutral while walking beside the car. “If ya hit my truck we’re gonna have words.”

“Yeah? Cause, you don’t really talk that much,” the kid pointed out nervously, looking back in time to catch Daryl’s glare. “Oh – yeah, gotcha. No hitting the truck, I’ll be careful I promise-“

“Shut up and steer.”

Luckily Merle’s deathtrap of a truck had enough juice to spark up the kid’s car, making the young man breathe a sigh of relief and smile over at Daryl – who was heaving for breath because _fuck_ that was a long way to push that heavy piece of crap – and the side of his mouth tilted involuntarily in return. But the kid took it as a smile, and held out his hand toward the redneck.

“Thanks, I’m Glenn,” the guy told him with a lot more volume and confidence now that he knew Daryl wasn’t going to stab him. Still, the friendliness threw Daryl off for a moment, until he did the human thing and returned the handshake.

“Daryl, yer welcome.” He watched the way the tiny four-door shuddered in idle, the sound of the A/C switching off as it protested and had issues turning over the engine despite the juice running through the battery. “Ya need gas ‘r somethin’? Shouldn’t be doin’ that.”

“I got a third of a tank?”

“Engine’s starv’d for fuel, it’s why it’s shakin’ like that,” Daryl told him absently, eyeing the sprawling insides of the car beneath the dented hood. “Or yer injectors need ta be cleaned, bad fuel pump or somethin’.”

“Yeah probably,” Glenn sighed, taking off his hat and rubbing his hand through his short dark hair. “Check engine light has been on for the past three months I think.” Daryl couldn’t help scoffing at that. “Hey, I don’t know anything about cars!” he said in his own defense, and as Daryl’s blood stopped pumping so fast from basically doing a redneck version of Cross-Fit across the asphalt his brain started to wake the fuck up and remind him this should be weird. He was used to people being scared of him, that was easy to deal with – stare them down, don’t give away an inch of the neutral face he’d mastered since he was twelve years old, and wait to see what they did. Usually they’d run, like Glenn had wanted to earlier, but sometimes they’d try to fight him. Try being the key word there, repeat incidents were never something Daryl had to worry about, he could put a man in the ground faster than most could blink.

But Glenn wasn’t scared of him anymore, he’d seen through the shell Daryl kept around himself like armor, because he’d been dumb enough to let it down for a moment and help the poor kid out. Part of him still wasn’t sure why, except it felt like the right thing to do at the time – something he’d never been taught to do growing up, but something he found himself _wanting_ to do. And that had been enough to push him forward without thinking too much on it, until apparently after the fact. When the damn Asian kid was smiling at him and joking with him like they were buddies, and Daryl didn’t know what to do with that. He was fucking winging it at this point, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to give up while he could – or see where this would go. Kid had deliveries after all, if he hung out instead of splitting he’d only be sticking around for about 30 more minutes while they waited for his car to juice up.

He told the kid that, watching as his face fell for a moment before his eyes got glazed and distant in thought, mulling something over pretty damn hard to not be making plans. “Does it have to stay connected?”

“Nah, just gotta keep it running until the battery is charged,” Daryl told him, digging in his jeans pocket for a crushed pack of cigarettes as he answered. Taking one out with his teeth and lighting it swiftly, before offering Glenn one out of courtesy, not offended when the kid shook his head politely. Too focused on considering the car and thinking about something so loudly Daryl could almost hear it.

“Bet I could cut through downtown, do the suburbs first so the car can stay on without getting jacked,” he muttered under his breath, eyes darting around as if reading invisible text while Daryl puffed clouds of smoke into the dark night. “That’d put me downtown closer to 11, and I could double back-”

“You don’t wanna be downtown in two hours Chinam’n,” Daryl told him, still side-eying him something harsh, his brother’s words slipping out of his mouth before he could take them back.

“I’m Korean,” Glenn corrected him, not even that upset as he reassessed his plan, reaching into his front seat for his backpack and using the headlights to light up the space on the ground by Daryl’s feet, dumping its contents onto the asphalt. “You know the area?”

“A bit,” Daryl muttered around his cigarette filter, taking in how the kid’s thought process (that must have been going a hundred miles an hour through his damn skull) was soon splayed across the asphalt. Watching as he made a makeshift layout of downtown with pencils lining the streets, accurately he might add, and some stray school supplies representing important stops or things he needed to know. An eraser in the middle of a ‘street’ to take the place of his car. “You got it,” he nodded when Glenn looked up at him to confirm the streets were right, the young man breathing a sigh of relief and beginning to move pieces around as he talked to himself – but still loud enough for Daryl to hear, including him in the planning process without preamble.

“So if I’m here,” he tapped two fingers on the eraser, before doing the same to other objects as he spoke, “and I need to deliver to this building down on the West side, but also over _here_ up in the suburbs, how do I keep the car running for 30 minutes without leaving it?”

“20 min’tes,” Daryl murmured, throwing the cigarette butt across the lot and then settling with his arms crossed across his broad chest, which was putting a strain on the sleeves. Again. Damn things were either shrinking in the wash, or he was going to have to start making Morales stack his own damn kegs when he delivered. Couldn’t keep ripping the sleeves off when the seams started digging into the skin on his upper arms, Dale hated it and would always make him change. Even if he had to go the nearest Walmart for a damn T-shirt. Just out of spite, whenever Dale pissed him off by making him come in early for stupid shit, or work seven fucking days a week because T-Dog “needed a weekend off”, Daryl would show up wearing fucking wife-beaters. Or worse, _dress_ shirts with the sleeves messily ripped off, just imagining the old man’s scowl if he ever checked the security cameras. It probably didn’t bother the old man as much as he let on, otherwise Daryl wouldn’t still have a job, but the banter was fun – to be honest, Dale was probably the closest person to a ‘friend’ that Daryl had in their small town.

“At this rate I might as well wait until the car's ready,” Glenn sighed, his carefully laid out plan seemingly a waste, but it had been clever – Daryl could see where he had been going with it. Weighing his odds, which times were safer in which parts of the city. He was probably planning on doubling back across the highways so everything got where it was supposed to be without taking for fucking ever. Far better problem solver than Daryl was, Glenn attempted everything without ever thinking about how much it was going to take him out of his way, just worried about getting the job done. Daryl just didn’t have that much effort to give.

“So,” Daryl heard himself breaking the silence, the wheels beginning to turn in his own head, pistons starting to churn and pump and lead his thoughts somewhere substantial. Which was more than he could say about the entire day he just wasted on his damn story. “You – uh, you in engineerin’ or somethin’?” That was dumb, he knew he sounded dumb, the confused look Glenn sent him confirmed it was dumb. Uncrossing his arms and re-crossing them the opposite way probably gave away his nerves, or the way he squared his shoulders defensively, shuffled his bare feet, face kept as neutral as possible but probably still set in his default of ‘possibly hostile’. In answer, Daryl pointed to the map of downtown Atlanta laid out in the headlight beams. “Ya seem resourceful an’ shit, know what’cha doing at least.”

Glenn let out a half startled, half bashful laugh, looking down at his handiwork. “I guess, but nah – not in school right now. Just delivering pizzas.” Daryl huffed a noncommittal sound, not a laugh or a scoff necessarily, but something bred of the deep thoughts that answer threw him into. It wasn’t any of his business, he’d just met the kid, but he was way too fucking smart to be ‘just delivering pizzas’ – weren’t kids like that supposed to be doing something with their lives? College, degree, house with the wife and 2.5 kids, American dream and all that – if something threw Glenn off of that track, or maybe he had a different one entirely, Daryl really wanted to know what it was. It was a battle going on in his head that he wasn’t used to, because Daryl wasn’t the type of person to be nosey, to dig into the ‘why’s and ‘how’s of a person’s life. That was their own fucking business. But this writing thing was making him so damn curious he was ashamed of himself, he had no reason to ask Glenn about anything really. So he shrugged, shoved all those questions to the back of his mind, and tried not to scowl at the one question that was left after he’d done the decent thing and stopped speculating on Glenn’s life.

How the fuck was Rick supposed to get out of that damn tank?

“What do you do?” Glenn asked out of the blue, polite – it’s what people did, Daryl had heard it time and time again at his bartop – so it shouldn’t have surprised him as much as it did. “Must be something awful to get you that angry after work.”

That time the huff _was_ a scoff that ricocheted through Daryl’s whole body, his job was the easiest damn thing on the planet. “Nah, I bartend in Buckhead, ‘snot why I was mad.” He really didn’t want to talk about it, but even bringing up his frustration from earlier kept that damn problem front and center, festering and bringing back that anger he had been trying to ignore by helping out the pizza delivery guy. It was easy to get lost in car parts, required more thinking than bartending – which was why he never came up with any little stories in his head when he had been working at Jim’s shop. The man was never going to let him live down the day he came into Dale’s bar to see Daryl just staring into space with a scene playing behind his eyes. Jim wasn’t one to tease, so all he had to do was catch Daryl staring at something hard, and let a little smirk pull at his lips to send the redneck into a storm of embarrassed fury. Dale was very envious.

Glenn looked ready to vibrate out his skin in an effort to _not ask._ They listened to his tortured car attempt to turn over and over while staying parked, with the kid looking at Daryl and looking away probably three separate times _each_ before Daryl finally heaved a heavy sigh and gave in.

“I’m writin’ somethin’,” he muttered so low and exasperated it sounded like a growl. “An’ probably just killed my main character, cause I don’ know what I’m fucking doing.” He shifted his entire frame, slanting his hips and shoulders to switch his weight to his other side and brought a hand up to run down his face. Which only gave him free access to chew on his thumbnail meticulously and mercilessly, the motions more subconscious than anything now, really it should have been surprising the appendage wasn’t just a clubbed stub of bone instead of a fingernail and skin. “Can’t find a way ta save his sorry ass, don’ know how ta fix it,” Daryl continued when Glenn kept looking at him expectantly, his backwoods drawl getting thicker as the anger caked back on layer by layer until that look of homicidal rage was settled back into his features.

“Sound frustrating,” Glenn said politely, trying to sympathize but Daryl would eat his shirt if the kid had written anything other than term papers and cheat codes since he hit puberty. Daryl grunted noncommittally, once again just staring into the contents of the open hood of the cars, as if looking between the POS Toyota and the rusted Ford truck he would somehow see an answer in the depths of the machines’ exposed engines. “What’s it about, your story?”

“Zombies,” Daryl answered honestly, not even caring by that point because he was so caught up in once again running through where Rick was and how he got there – until the word came out of his mouth. Then his eyes snapped over to the kid next to him, half daring him to say anything and half scared that he _just might_. “World ended, cause’a zombies.” Glenn nodded and kept his wide eyes as blank of any judgment as he could, which was good because Daryl was ten seconds away from just leaving the kid out there with his brother’s fucking truck and going back to his apartment because _fuck this_ – the hell did he even come outside for?

“Like _Left 4 Dead,_ or the multiplayer on _Black Ops_?”

Daryl blinked, because really that’s all he could do. He vaguely recognized ‘Black Ops’ as a video game, but that was the extent of his knowledge on what just came out of Glenn’s mouth.

“…Mor’ like _Zombieland_?” Daryl tried carefully, turning to what he knew best. His Netflix list. “But in Atlanta, an’ not as funny.” The dead were way scarier in what he was writing than most of those damn movies, more disturbing, and not something to scoff at.

“Funny at all?”

“’bout as funny as _Resident Evil_ ta be honest,” Daryl said that more around his thumb, obstructing his words, starting to regret even saying anything – but Glenn wasn’t making fun of him. Was actually thinking about it, it looked like, trying to understand.

“So more like _The Last of Us_ ,” Glenn continued to ask, and Daryl tried his damn hardest not to glare because he obviously didn’t know jack shit about video games. Glenn had a moment to look apologetic before he continued on, “it’s about a guy taking this little girl across the country during the ZA, it’s all survival and storylines and drama and stuff.”

Yeah that sounded more right, or how Daryl _wanted_ it to go – if he ever got Rick out of the damn tank – so he nodded without answering, and Glenn looked genuinely interested then. Leaning back on the side of the car to sit on the edge of the headlight, he let a small smile loose that lit up his eyes as well, and didn’t look away from Daryl’s face. “Tell me about it.”

Fuck.

Where did he even start?

\--

“What a _dumbass_ ,” Glenn exclaimed into the night, complaining in a way that was way too close to a whine, nose scrunched up in borderline disgust and his whole expression as exasperated as Daryl had been feeling all day. “I mean – yeah there was nowhere else to go. But like, at that point he might as well have just ran, and he dropped the bag of guns too?” He let out a groan and doubled over before sitting back up all in the same swift movement. “How many bullets does he have in his clip?” he almost looked afraid to ask.

“He pulled a Beretta off the soldier in there, ran out before – so it should be one clip,” Daryl told him, also trying to remember what Rick had. Daryl had written him with a non-specific old revolver, like a Colt or something from those black and white Westerns, maybe he had said it was a Colt Python like the one he eyed in the gun shop by their trailer park when he was young – shit he was going to have to get all those weapons down. Start making lists.

“That’s 15 rounds?” Glenn asked, but kept going like it was rhetorical. “He’ll have to make them count,” he added, shaking his head in disbelief. “I mean, it’s Georgia he can’t stay in that tank forever without dying from heat stroke.”

Daryl nodded too, “Yeah I look’d it up.” His pale blue eyes caught Glenn’s, and in that moment he was glad the kid was taking this as seriously as he was. Made him feel a little less like he was going crazy.

“He’s going to have to make a run for it,” Glenn finally said after a few moments of stretched silence, and at Daryl’s annoyed glance he held his hands up. “Hear me out! My way isn’t as dumb as it sounds!”

“How?!” Daryl demanded, knowing he was close to shouting, because _seriously_? He spent almost a fucking week trying to keep Rick alive in this damn tank, and the kid’s idea was for him to _run?_

“You need eyes on the outside,” Glenn told him, excitement bleeding through his words, though he looked completely serious. “You got someone out there that can see what’s going on, which direction to run, and which alleys might be more clear than the others so he can _use_ those 15 bullets sparingly and make it to whoever can see him. Climb up a stairwell or into a building, a car that’s waiting, _something_. You have a lot of possibilities,” the kid looked almost giddy at that aspect, and Daryl had grown really still because –

Yeah, that could work.

“Gives you a chance to introduce more characters too,” Glenn said with an energized grin. “Can’t be just him, he’d be fucked. What’s his name?”

“I – don’t have one for him yet,” Daryl lied, and even Glenn could see that wasn’t necessarily true.

“Might want to get on that.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Daryl muttered completely deadpan. “So, someone helps him. Radio in the tank?”

“Worth a shot, you said he was a cop right? Those frequencies won’t go down just because the world ended,” Glenn pointed out, readjusting his hat again after running a hand through his hair. The two were sitting on the ground by that point, facing each other and had been talking for God knows how long. Daryl really hoped Glenn wasn’t going to lose his job for this, maybe he could call the pizza place and tell them about Glenn’s car after the kid left.

“Good news is that means he’ll have someone, just gotta plan ‘em out now,” Daryl grumbled, nervous at the prospect of writing new characters.

“Nah that’s not good news. Just means there’s someone to tell him that he’s screwed, he’s gotta be surrounded by those geeks,” Glenn sighed.

“You got good news for him at all?”

Glenn paused, thought about it, “No.” Daryl huffed in laughter, and Glenn grinned after a minute.

“Can’t laugh, not s’posed to be funny.”

“Gotta be funny sometimes,” Glenn pointed out. “How else would they survive the zombie apocalypse? I’d jack a cool car, if I could, but the smart thing would be to hop from building to building using the fire escapes, rooftops and stuff like that.” Daryl really wished he had his notebook right about then. “You could slip in and out of the city easy, gather what supplies you need, and then head back out with no problems.”

“If ya know what yer doin’,” Daryl added.

“Well yeah,” Glenn scoffed, “but of course they _would_. Whoever saves your guy isn’t going to be just anyone. He survived that long, he’ll be key to keep on surviving.” Daryl nodded, he hadn’t really thought too much about who else would be there with Rick when he finally did start meeting people. Hell, he didn’t even know where Lori, Shane, and Carl were. Just that Rick would get back to them eventually. But who else would be a part of the group in the city? Would they push this guy to help Rick? Or would the guy, or girl he guessed, just help Rick out of the kindness of their hearts?

“Would you do it?” Daryl asked seriously, Glenn looking at him in confusion again. “Ya saw a guy stuck in a tank, surrounded by zombies, and you got’a radio – would ya stick yer neck out for ‘em?”

Glenn only took five seconds to pause and think before answering. “Yeah, yeah I would,” he said with a small smile, glancing back at Daryl from where he was leaning against his shuddering car. “Call it – foolish  naïve hope that, if I’m ever that far up Shit Creek one day, someone would do the same for me.” Daryl couldn’t help the small quirk to his mouth at that, Glenn was a good guy – Daryl didn’t know if he himself would do that for someone, but it was nice to know that there were people like Glenn out there that would probably make it that far and still believe in things like that. Glenn kind of laughed at Daryl’s small smirk, “Probably makes me a dumbass, too. But hey, it’s worked out so far.” Indeed it had, fuck Daryl might have made an actual friend – this was certainly the easiest conversation he’d had in a long time with another guy. Wasn’t that what friendship was?

“Thanks,” Daryl grunted out, not sure why he felt the need to say it. “Fer helpin’ me, it’s been drivin’ me nuts.”

“I could tell, thought you were going to kill me when you opened the door.”

“I might’ve if ya ran off with my pizza,” Daryl snarked, sneer tearing across his face in a manner that was too much like his brother and his Pa for him to feel comfortable with, but Glenn didn’t seem to take offense to it. Instead his eyes got wide and he shot to his feet, Daryl following suit but much slower.

“Shit, I’m _so_ late,” Glenn panicked, gathering his stuff into his backpack and letting Daryl swiftly unhook the jumper cables for his car battery. “But hey! Here,” he scrambled for his back pocket for the receipts of all his orders, tearing Daryl’s in half and scribbling something across it. “If you got any other zombie stuff that gets you stuck, just shoot me a text, I’ve played way too many survival games so I can try and help.” He shoved it at the redneck, and only after he did so paused and his eyes got really wide. “If you want, I mean – you haven’t grabbed for your phone otherwise I’d just type it in. This is just for your story, not that you’re not a cool guy – I mean we could be friends? Just want you to know I’m not hitting on you or anything, _not that there’s anything wrong with that!”_   Daryl just continued to stare at him after he took the thin scrap of paper. “Shit, I’m sorry – I –“

“Relax Korea,” Daryl finally said with a slight smirk, he shouldn’t have let Glenn put his foot so far in his mouth, it was just nice to see someone else do it for a change. “Thanks,” he added, holding up the paper before shoving it in his jeans pocket. “I’ll take ya up on it, I’m sure. Don’t know shit ‘bout zombies, except fer the movies.”

“Might want to call them something besides zombies,” Glenn suggested as he headed for his driver’s side door. “Zombies can be a mouthful, my friends and I call them geeks.” Daryl’s nose scrunched at that, “Hey, you’ll come up with something! You’re a creative guy!” Daryl couldn’t help rolling his eyes at the kid’s enthusiasm, but he returned the young man’s fist bump and watched his rickety car disappear out of the parking lot. He shoved his hands in his pockets as he walked back to his apartment, immediately pulling out the phone number scribbled in chicken-scratch, and began to contemplate other characters for Rick to interact with.

There had to be a group, not just the guy that wanted to help the idiot in the tank, but who would they be? Daryl had yet to just _make up_ his own characters, he always picked from the people he knew already, could observe and work their quirks and personalities into the mold of whatever setting he had laid out for them. He had a lot to choose from after all. Right now there was just a handful standing around Rick in Daryl’s mind’s eye when he had entertained the thought before meeting Glenn – nameless faces, one kind of looking like Dale now that he thought about it. But Dale wouldn’t go near the city, he was too smart for that – he'd be off in the fucking woods with that damn RV he loves so much dressed like it was a vacation. He'd steer clear of all the chaos, try to wait it out – as he should, but not everyone had as many miles on them as Dale Horvath.

There had to be a few people that, when thrown into this fight or die situation, would be just that perfect balance of brave and stupid.

Ironically, those two words combined made Daryl think of his brother – which he scoffed at as he sat down on his couch to pull up the page he’d been staring at all day – and then the other person they made him think of was Glenn. Glenn who was just a kid, but smart as fuck, thin and small and could easily access every inch of the city because he had fucking memorized it on his damn delivery routes. Who could be that zombie apocalypse-savvy savior for his main character, and would be kind enough to help Rick try and save himself. Or stupid enough, depending on how you looked at it.

Daryl had the pencil in his hand before he had even thought about it. And right below where he had described in excruciating detail how utterly _fucked_ Rick was, he wrote a sentence about the radio crackling to life in the still silence of the interior of the army tank. Rick looking up in disbelief, not sure if he was hearing things or if his head was still ringing from the gunshot, until words started to come through over the frequency.

_“Hey you. Dumbass. Yeah you in the tank, you cozy in there?”_

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm about to run out the door and head to work, but I promise I'll reply to all of your wonderful comments from last chapter as soon as I get settled in there C: I'm so glad you all liked my intro with Glenn, it was one of my favorite interactions, but now we get to introduce the rest of the group from the quarry! \o/ BIG big thanks to my lovely betas, Ijustwantedyoutoneedme and MaroonCamaro. I feel like I have my own set of Charlie's Angels and I'm the voice behind the speaker, cause they do all the hardwork and I get to sit back and watch them be gorgeous. (Daryl is the third, don't argue, also there should be a Charlie's Angels AU in this fandom, just saying). Okay thank you again for reading, I hope you enjoy this one too :)

\--

Daryl became so invested in his  story – which unraveled as quickly as it had begun after the night he met Glenn –  that he almost forgot about the real Rick Grimes. 

Which was a feat because who could  _ forget _ about Rick Grimes?

And yet , he had. Until one boring Tuesday afternoon in late March, when he had finished setting up prep for the evening and was scribbling in his notepad as fast as the ideas and words were coming to him. He’d gotten pretty skilled at writing as fast as his thoughts, though the faster he had to write the worse his handwriting got, making it hard to decipher in places later. But he had been on a pretty good roll when a voice broke through the bubble of  phrases and images and dialogue that had been buzzing through his head like white noise, screeching everything to a halt.

“What’re ya writing?” 

Daryl looked right up into Rick’s insanely blue eyes, the other man watching him with a curious and fond expression –  and his gaze lighting up with an exasperated smile and  a  huff of laughter as Daryl snapped his notebook shut and pulled it closer to him. “Some kinda secret?” He joked, but Daryl couldn’t even answer, because he was suddenly hit with the  _ intimate _ amount of time he’d been spending writing about this man. Who  was a  _ real _ person, and probably not at all like Daryl had been writing him, and the last thing he needed was for Rick to see his name sprawled in Daryl’s chicken-scratch inscription all over the damn pages of his notebook. He was  borderline horrified. 

“Nah, it’s nothin’,” Daryl tried to answer, already feeling his face heating up as Rick gave him his  _ undivided fucking attention _ and  Goddammit  why couldn’t he just  _ talk _ . “Just – somethin’ I work on when ‘m bored.” Rick’s head  tilted to the side, still inspecting Daryl’s face for traces of what he was hiding - and that sent a shot of something hot and primal straight down his spine as he realized Rick was practically  _ dissecting _ him with his gaze. Any other words he could have spoken died on his tongue.

Fuck, they were all alone in the bar too. 

And Daryl’s imagination started veering off in a  _ very  _ different direction than five minutes prior. 

But his eyes didn’t even have time to glaze over in thought. He wasn’t sure if Rick could see his pupils dilate in the dim lights when he started to think about all the things that could happen in the next 10 seconds, or what he  _ wanted  _ to happen, because the harsh sound of the metal doors hitting the wood and tin walls echoed through the space so loudly he visibly flinched. 

“WE NEED TWO PITCHERS OF BEER – ASAP, AND A PIZZA!” Shane’s voice boomed as soon as the double doors broke open, sunlight pouring into the dark little bar from the world outside. A blur of dark hair and wide smiles with an essence of victory around him shattered whatever heated air was starting to fill the small space between Rick and Daryl – thank God the bartop was there, was all Daryl thought to himself.

“We don’t have pizza,” Daryl told him with a scowl. “Or food.” It was a damn bar, not a diner. They had people from established restaurants come in and use the abandoned kitchen to serve food on game nights and weekends, renting the space same as the live music did for the stage. Dale didn’t have the patience to deal with a full cooking staff, he barely had enough to deal with Daryl and T-Dog, so to him that was the easiest solution. But at 4:00 in the afternoon on a Tuesday? The only thing they would find in that kitchen was uncut bar fruit and cobwebs. 

“Then we should order one! Meat Lovers, extra pepperoni.”

“This look like a damn drive-thru?” Daryl scowled harder, practically glaring at Shane, who only shrugged it off and pulled out his cell phone to dial up the local place down the street. Rick  shot  him an apologetic look, holding up a hand as Shane  started to very loudly place a delivery order, mouthing ‘just one pitcher’. And the way he pulled his lips to better form the words was not distracting  _ at all _ , nope, not in the slightest. So Daryl spun around and started pouring Budweiser just to spite Shane, keeping his head down and focusing on breathing, before turning back to slide it and two cold glasses across the counter. “Y’two are early today.”

“ _ Started _ early today,” Rick said with another easy smile, and Daryl wasn’t sure how he hadn't noticed  the relaxed slope of the other man’s shoulders and  the fluidity of his limbs, the light tan on his skin that was flirting with a sunburn. They must have had the day off, drinking it away playing golf or some shit,  the razor focus of Rick's stunning blue eyes the only juxtaposition to that assumption. Either he wasn’t near as gone as Shane was, meaning he hadn’t been drinking as much, or he was one of those guys that could hit a bullseye dead center at the gun range one-handed after slamming back a shot of bourbon.

That last prospect should not have been as hot as it was, but Daryl could see it  _ vividly _ in his mind’s eye and it made him swallow hard. 

Luckily he didn’t have to try and converse much more with Rick Grimes, because hurricane Shane was back front and center to steal his attention away. Though it only lasted a minute or two, Rick was watching him out of the corner of his eye, eventually turning his head none too casually to see what Daryl was  doing. Which  was sliding his notepad off of the counter as nonchalantly as he  could before  Shane noticed it wasn’t just something from work, and the small smile that curved at the corner of Rick’s mouth was mesmerizing. He looked a little pleased with himself, to have seen something that let him learn a little about the quiet bartender – that Daryl  _ really _ hoped  he hadn’t noticed was always staring at him – and Daryl’s heart was beating a million miles a minute. 

Part of it was probably still residual from Rick almost reading what he was writing over the counter, but he had no illusions that it also had to do with the officer’s new found interest in Daryl’s face. He wasn’t sure what he had done to gain Rick’s attention, but having it staring him in the face was not something he had been prepared for – would probably ever be prepared for – and there was a voice in the back of his head that reminded him Shane had the gorgeous man day drinking probably since sunrise and he shouldn’t take the attention to heart. But hell he’d fucking  _ gift _ the man a six pack every morning if it kept those blue eyes trained on him like they had been since he  had  walked into the bar. 

Though at the same time he wanted Rick to go over to his corner with Shane so he could continue what he was doing, which was writing an intriguing scene that he couldn’t have predicted the week prior. 

Daryl had written a crazy amount since meeting Glenn, the pizza delivery guy staying true to his word and helping him through text messaging (at all hours of the night, matching his late work hours when he typically wrote the most) and together they’d planned out how to get Rick and the group out of Atlanta. Though Daryl had yet to mention the young Asian man that ended up saving Rick’s sorry ass from a tank in the middle of the street was based on  _ his _ likeness – and he doubted he ever would. Daryl had hidden them in a department store building, one of the tall ones  downtown that had way too many floors of clothes and shoes and purses and shit, but would be perfect to raid for a large group camped on the outskirts of the city. He had his boss to thank for that location. Daryl had had long conversations with Dale about what he would do if the world ended, and true to what Daryl had imagined, the old man would don shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and park his fucking camper out by a lake or quarry and sit his ass in a lawn chair with a rifle just waiting for it to be over. Daryl had pretty much torn his lip to mince meat listening to the older man talk about how society would crumble, give long aggressive depictions of the collapse of systems and the government and military and  _ why _ they would fail, ranting and raving and not getting to the point Daryl really wanted. 

“Would – would ya take anyone in?” Daryl finally got a word in edge-wise, making the other man fall silent and stare at him like he had forgotten what they were talking about. “Say – some folks show’d up, families with kids, an’ wanted to stick wi’cha by the water. Took care’a themselves, but ya know – strength in numbers and all that shit.” Dale had lost his wife a few years back, spent the time in between angry and resentful and more than a little hateful of the world and the way everything always seemed to work out – he hadn’t even considered other people. And Daryl wondered, for a moment, what would happen if he did. Watched as Dale stared at him, a look that had too much light and nameless emotions that Daryl couldn’t decipher. He’d never seen them pointed at him before, he couldn’t tell if they were positive or not, they held softness that was heavier than tar and stuck and burned just as bad. He almost regretted opening his mouth, about to tell the old man to forget it, when Dale finally spoke.

“Yeah,” he answered slow, “you know I probably would. Don’t  care much for people, but at the end of the world – I reckon I would kind of miss them.” He regarded Daryl carefully, insightful eyes too inspecting for Daryl’s liking, but they had something in them that made the redneck think that Dale was on the verge of smiling. “This story isn’t really about zombies, is it?”

“Course it is,” Daryl scoffed quietly, looking down at his frantic notes he’d made on Dale’s character, picking and choosing what to keep and what might change when the world was turned upside down. “Killed almost everyone, world is gone  - military, government, all of  it's gone. All that’s left is some people, and the dead ones.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Dale told him, sounding more in tune with the conversation than he had the entire time he’d been downing his white Russians and ranting about the way of the world. Now he was in Daryl’s world, and the bartender had never seen Dale’s eyes so wide and focused at the same time,  _ intrigued _ . He watched him carefully from behind his bangs, still leaning on the counter, but not backing away. Not denying a damn thing. “You’re not writing about people getting their faces ripped off, you’re writing about  _ people _ .” He actually looked astounded now, and that smile started to twitch at the side of his mouth. “And how they change, how the end of the world would change  _ them _ , and their priorities. You hear a miserable old fuck like me wants to park my camper out in the woods and stay clear of everything like the coward I am, while thousands of people die, and you ask if I’d take someone in if they stumbled across me? Would I give two shits about a family that parked next to me, or ten even and made a community next to a lake? With watches and sharing water and food and warmth?  _ Daryl _ \- I don’t know if I would do that, but  _ you  _ do. You see potential when others don’t, and I never would have guessed that about you.” He was shaking his head by the end of his monologue, laughing at a few words but not in malice or joy – something else that was difficult for Daryl to place. He wished he knew more, had more interactions with people who actually liked his ass to look back on. “I’ll admit,” Dale added, shrugging his shoulders with a small lilt to his voice, “I’m impressed. Keep going kid, you might just make something worthwhile out of it.”

That was the closest he was going to get to a blessing on his story.

And Daryl fucking  _ ran _ with it after that.

Slowly, over the next week he added people that he’d met – or known for a while – into the group in Atlanta. His imagination running away like a damn freight train, off the tracks and all over the landscape, as  he threw people together who would probably never meet despite the fact that they lived in the same town or went to the same bar – just on different days. Daryl was curious at how they would react and interact as they tried to work together in a setting that was essentially the apocalypse, but was really just a hostile world where banning together was your only option. And the words poured like water from a broken levee, spelling out the people he had gotten to know fairly well over the few years he’d lived and worked in Buckhead, Georgia. 

The first person he wrote in was his brother’s lawyer, Andrea, who really only talked to Daryl since he was the only one that took the entire thing seriously. Merle always spent their sessions hitting on the blonde-haired woman, though she had tough skin and didn’t take his shit – she’d be tough if ever set in a fight or die situation. But she was kind to them, called Daryl sweetheart and honestly tried to help his brother out despite their poor income and priors. Daryl had almost gone to jail with his brother this last time, arrested by association and evidence that was so painfully circumstantial Daryl could’ve done a better job in his own defense based on Law & Order episodes than his damn court-appointed attorney. And then in came Andrea Harrison like a damn tornado, who had  overheard the first court hearing and had pulled Daryl aside before he was escorted out, telling him she’d settle the case  pro bono if he wanted – though the way she said it she really wasn’t giving him a choice. Normally a civil rights lawyer, she knew her shit and got his case completely thrown out the next trial date, and got his brother a reduced sentence and a location closer to where Daryl would be living. She stuck her neck out on a lot of occasions for them, and never asked for a dime. Merle insisted she was sweet on him – but Daryl liked to think it was the woman’s way of flipping off that giant  courthouse  in downtown Atlanta. Bold and loud that the system didn’t get to fuck anyone over, no matter where they came from or what they looked like, not on her watch. She was tough as nails, that’s why he wrote her as the one that pulled a gun on Rick as soon as they made it inside the department store, cussing up a storm and about to shoot him because they were all dead already – all thanks to Rick and his ‘shoot first run later’ philosophy. 

Secondly he added the nice woman who worked at the city zoning office, that he usually made small talk with while they waited in the visiting room at the county jail – they tended to be there on the same days, though Daryl visited his brother every month or so, and she visited her son on a weekly basis. It had taken the better part of a year and some tentative smiles from the  woman - who saw his dedication and was the first to ask if the man he always visited was his brother or his Pa - before they started talking. She was a quiet thing, thin with kind eyes and a small smile, but after talking with Glenn one night late on a Sunday he realized her knowledge of the buildings in the city would be a good advantage. It took more than he would admit to finally introduce himself, after months of just talking awkwardly and making short exchanges that sometimes turned to conversations. Always interrupted by the buzz of the gate during visiting hours, so there was never time to exchange names, but Daryl had gone in on his day off that week to see Merle and finally extended his hand and told the woman his name. Her name was Jacquie, and she smiled wide at his attempt at being social, but Daryl didn’t dare ask her about anything to do with his story. This wasn’t the time or place, though he had confidence in her determination – not to mention the  _ sass  _ that poured out of her mouth from time to time – and used that as a basis when writing her character into the group.

He did a similar basis with Morales, the guy who drove the liquor store delivery truck, stocking them with a variety of Dale’s favorites and endless amounts of kegs and bottled beer. He was a hard worker except for his thrown out back, so Daryl usually did most of the keg stacking when he unloaded them into the cooler area behind the back wall. He was a nice enough guy, came in once or twice for a beer with some friends of his that bitched and complained he never went out with them, but that was because he had four kids and one was just a baby. 10 months, Daryl got to see pictures when the group took up a corner of his bar top one night, and the pride in the other man’s smile was something that was perplexing to look at for Daryl. But it also released some of the tension between his  shoulders - babies  scared the fuck out of him. He was too used to the screaming and crying that rang out in the trailer park he grew up in that ranged from abandoned wails to blood-curdling screams – the woman who had been next door beat her kids senseless when they cried and he winced every time he even caught sight of one now. But Morales had a fierceness to his love for his kids, Daryl saw it in the way he worked three hard jobs and always came home to them at the end of the day, threw away his friends and his leisure and just relaxed into the bonds of family that Daryl would never understand. His kids were all he talked about, his wife his go-to voice of wisdom and reason, and the few times he came in he ducked out before 10 o’clock sober as a preacher and always saying goodbye to Daryl with a promise to see him in a few days. A good guy, through and through, and Daryl wrote him in to talk Andrea down without even blinking an eye, the voice of reason and the one who wasn’t afraid to make decisions when a leader was lacking. He’d go far, fighting for his family, and Daryl didn’t have one doubt in his mind that he would be one of the few who hadn’t lost a single member of it to the hoards of the walking dead. 

T-Dog was thrown in there too, at the end of it, because he was an absolute dick some days but he was a tough son of a bitch. Daryl didn’t know much about him other than he was black and didn’t trust Daryl further than he could throw him, but to be fair he always showed up in the middle of their rush on Fridays and Saturdays so Daryl didn’t get much time to be  social. He  was really just the support for the weekends while Daryl was the main bartender for the  _ entire _ week. With the younger man covering his one or two days off during the week if Dale couldn’t, because Daryl didn’t love this dusty  deathtrap as much as it looked like he did. So that weekend after he met Glenn, and decided Rick needed people to meet, he paused before he stepped out for a smoke and shouted a “hey” to T-Dog now that it was almost closing time. He jerked his head outside, flashing his cigarette pack and offering one to the other man, who took one readily and the two stepped out the double doors for a few minutes. Dale ended up having to come and get them, snapping a question about why no one was behind the bar, because he and T-Dog actually  _ conversed _ for the first time in the 10 months they had worked together. He had another job during the week working at a high-end athletic store, and also spent a lot of time helping out his church and the old folks there, his grandmother among them. He knew a bit about what Daryl had been writing, had laughed at him more than once, but Daryl didn’t bother hesitating to ask around the cigarette in his mouth what T-Dog would do if the world suddenly came crashing down. Without missing a beat he replied he would grab the church van and go to all the senior’s homes and make sure they could get out of the city safely, find a place out of the way until it all was blown over – Daryl mentioning Dale’s camp out at the quarry, and they had laughed at the old man’s expense and talked about the logistics until said bar owner came to snap at them. 

It was insanely enlightening, actually talking with people – nerve wracking and spiking his anxiety Daryl didn’t even know he had around people – but it kept heeding results he hadn’t expected. 

And soon he had a real story, a real plot with more characters than just Rick Grimes and the man who saved him from the side of the road. 

Everything was finally moving forward. 

There was one big glaring problem, though, and it had puzzled Daryl for a few days – yes Rick had been a little dumb, playing fast and loose with his survival instincts, but in that point in time he was the worst thing that could’ve happened to the new group. Which did not bode well for Rick to continue being the ‘hero’ of the story.

Andrea lowered her gun and glared at him, with bright eyes hiding tears, seething that they were all dead. Because of Rick. The next sequential step was to snap them out of this hostile air, get them all working together, and get them out of the city and back to the quarry. But Rick was currently the village idiot, so to speak, and they weren’t going to listen to him unless he stepped the fuck up and  _ made _ them, or something worse came along. Something that centered  _ them _ as the survivors, and not among the ones who didn’t give a fuck. They needed an example of who else made it in this dead world Daryl had created – someone who didn’t care what happened cause the world was fucked, someone who was borderline suicidal in their lack of empathy, and pushed limits further than they should when responsible for other’s safety. But of the people Daryl had chosen to write, not one would voluntarily let someone like that into the city and allow them to watch their backs. 

He’d been hunched over his coffee table at home when the thought struck him as to who would fit. His back had started to kill him in the middle of the scene, so he had slid to the floor at some point to continue writing like a  five-year-old  would color with crayons, and it was there that he huffed in laughter and stopped  mid-sentence – thinking that the person he needed sounded way too much like his brother.

If there was anyone that was the worst combination of charismatic and the most awful kind of asshole you would ever have the misfortune to meet, it was Merle. 

He always got his way when he set his mind to it. He could sell dirt to pig farmers if he wanted to – they would just hate him afterward. Most people did, soon as Merle opened his big fat mouth, couldn’t keep their daddy’s words to himself, lived and breathed by them and even Daryl would shy away from his racist slurs and general disregard for every other thing that breathed oxygen. He loved Merle, always would – he was his brother and Daryl owed him more than he could ever say, he always took care of Daryl ever since they were small and Daryl couldn’t do shit to defend himself – but he was the biggest pain in the ass to deal with.

Especially when he was high.

Fuck, if Daryl needed a catalyst to break up what Rick had done – something worse than bringing down a hoard of zombies on them – leave it up to Merle Dixon to show up and ruin everything. 

What followed was a complete accident, shots fired above them, a descriptive scene of a man who was far too focused with a rifle and scope taking down zombies one by one in the street below from the rooftop. Like picking little tin animals off a line at a carnival game, not a fucking care in the world – which was highlighted by the slurred hysterical laugh when Morales and T-Dog came running up asking what the fuck he was doing. Shit, there was nothing worse than Daryl’s brother when he was high, and if the world ended he’d get his kicks every fucking minute. Drinking, drugs, pills, guns, shooting things and killing the dead bastards in ways that were probably too sadistic for Daryl to even come up with – his brother had sociopathic tendencies that were so well hidden beneath his thick Southern skin even the prison doctors  hadn't seen  it. Which was  how he always got out on good behavior, too good at playing the system and playing people to stay inside for long. Though Daryl had only ever known that ambition and careful showmanship to be targeted towards his next fix, impressive but always ending with his older brother sprawled in a drooling mess on the floor – on good days. On bad ones he  would break his hand punching through a wall. 

Daryl should’ve known better than to ask his brother anything about his story, hell Merle didn’t even know he was writing it – but he needed to get a reminder of how his brother might act when faced with that mindset. Fight or die, survive or get torn to shreds, kill or be killed – his older brother would be so on board with those new rules of society that he would probably thrive. It caused him a few headaches, to say the least, before he had even  _ gotten  _ to the county jail, but sitting in the waiting room just waiting for his brother to stroll in with his orange jumpsuit around his waist and probably some new Arian tattoos was not the  _ best _ way to prep himself for the conversation he was about to have. He should’ve at least come up with an idea how to bring it up without sounding like an idiot. 

As Daryl suspected, Merle laughed in his fucking face – the two sitting across from one another at the tables next to the open window so the older man could chain smoke a pack while they caught up. “Yer fuckin’ _what_?” He near shrieked, “What’cha mean yer _writing_? Writin’ what, romance novels?” Daryl’s pointed glare and scowl combo did nothing but make his brother smirk wider around his cigarette, snickering to himself at the embarrassed red tint on Daryl’s face that he would _never_ outgrow, and would always try to cover up with anger that he could see right through. “Nah wait, wait – I know: yer _Diary of Anne Frank_ ’n our childhood, that it? _Woe is me_ , we didn’ ev’n have an attic ta stuff ya in-“

“Shut up, Merle,” Daryl snarled, spitting his words around the smoke he was puffing like a damn chimney. “Ain’t nuthin’ like that –“

“Well it’s gotta be som’ pussy-ass thin’ or a’nuther, ta getcha panties ‘n a bunch like they are. Chill littl’ brother, I’m not gonna stop ya – can’ exactly snatch it away from ya now can I?” That was the closest Daryl was going to get to a reassurance, so despite the tick to twitch his eye at every word his brother breathed, Daryl asked the dreaded questions. Already knowing half the answers.

Most of them were just bravado, “Fuck, zombies? Hell yes baby bro! You an’ me, we’d take everythin’ we’d get our hands on. And them dead bastards, Dixon  brothers  would be op’n for business lemme tell ya.” Exaggerated swings of his arms mimicking knocking off heads with 2x4s, gunning down a hoard with some automatic rifles he’d been eyeing back where they used to live together. Talk of who's houses he’d hit up for his stash, giant tangents on coming across people and taking their shit, laying low with groups only to rob them blind during the night. In his mind, he and Daryl would be living like kings – and it was everything Daryl could’ve ever expected from his brother.

He was perfect. 

\--

“Saw ya up at the county jail the other day,” Shane said out of the blue, turning to Daryl unexpectedly as he and Rick grabbed their pitchers and glasses to go retreat to their corner, but the man’s smirking face was in a  careless teasing tilt that made the hair on the back of Daryl’s neck stand up. “Conjugal visit?”

Daryl did his very best  not to grab Shane by his smug fucking face and slam it into the bar top between them.

It took everything to just settle into the heated glare that should’ve scorched the man’s skin at a glance, and seethe something that resembled words, “Was visitin’ my  _ brother _ .” If Shane had seen him at the jail he had probably seen Merle too. “Which ya  _ know _ , ya fuckin’ prick!” 

“Ain’t ever seen ya up there before, ‘t’s not surprisin’ tho,” Shane prodded, none the wiser, though Rick looked ready to pull his partner out of the line of fire, and possibly wring his neck himself. “Not with yer family anyway, guess it pays ta be the black sheep sometimes. Pfft – d-did ya beg at his hearin’ ta get him transferred closer or somethin’?”

“ _ Shane!” _ Rick snapped in anger, snatching the pitcher from his friend and shoving him in the direction of the pool table just in time to save him from Daryl reaching across the counter to fucking strangle him. “Get over there and  _ shut up! _ ” Even his wide, endlessly deep blue eyes looking at Daryl with the most sincere apology splayed across his gorgeous fucking face  couldn't calm the rage the redneck was feeling in that moment. “Look, I’m  _ so  _ sorry-“ Daryl had to focus on breathing, his chest heaving, as he threw the rag he’d been using to clean and polish the appliances to the fucking ground, and stopped himself from throwing the glassware as well just to hear it shatter. Turning away and shouldering his way into the back where he could step inside the joint beer/keg cooler and calm the fuck down because Shane was  _ drunk _ and Daryl probably shouldn’t be serving him anyway but he was such a fucking  _ dick _ that  _ really _ didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut and now Daryl just wanted to kick his teeth in! 

Fuck, he’d finally thought he’d gotten away from that stereotypical  _ bullshit _ that stuck to his damn skin like tar. But apparently he’d just been kidding himself the whole damn time. He’d always been the white trash he was born into, just lucky enough to graduate high school and keep his ass out of jail, a freak among his own kind and an accident waiting to happen among the rest. He thought, after a few years of doing what everyone always said he fucking  _ couldn’t _ , that it might finally change. He might finally change.

Guess he’d been wrong about that too.

He fucking hated Shane.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is belated folks, I was having a real struggle with it and I tried to rewrite the first half and idek what it is anymore but I hope you all enjoy it anyway :) I'm still not convinced I do, but I do like adding in bits from the special features. Did y'all know Daryl was supposed to be killed off in season one! And aren't we all glad he wasn't ;)
> 
> Also, I'm sorry to say but I'm about to have an extremely busy week and a half and updating is going to go on hiatus until Monday the 10th. I've got this update, SD2, and hopefully a birthday thing if I edit it but I'm going to be doing a lot of workshops for work this week. And I'll be traveling to TX to see my husband graduate Air Force Basic Training next weekend and I'm not sure I'll have time/wifi to update. But I'll have a lovely lay-over in St. Louis on my way home that will last _two hours_ so I'll be sure to update that Monday. I'm sorry I haven't replied to comments, I do love hearing what you all think and if you like where I'm taking this. So much thanks to Ijustwantedyoutoneedme and MaroonCamaro for not only being my betas but taking turns holding me up while I've been all alone the past few weeks, I love you both  <3

\--

The two men stayed at the back of the bar the rest of the night, it was a Thursday so Daryl had other weekly patrons to tend to and keep him busy – keep him from noticing how much Rick looked over at him. Blue eyes tracking his movements, and his perceptive expression giving away how hard he was trying to listen to every clipped word Daryl muttered to the people he was serving. It was unnerving, being under the microscope like that – hell Daryl would’ve given anything the day prior to have the other man’s undivided attention like this, but now Daryl would’ve given a fucking kidney to have him focus on the damn pool table and whatever shitty story Shane was trying to tell.

He was already putting the whole situation behind him, it wasn’t the first time someone had thrown in his face that he was useless white trash that was far better off than he should be, and it wouldn’t be the last. Besides, he had other shit to think about, like the scene he had been in the middle of when Rick fucking Grimes walked in and started talking to him.

That visit to the prison and talking to his brother had been inspiring, to say the least, and very leading in where Daryl wanted to go with his story about the group stuck inside downtown Atlanta. He’d smoked almost an entire pack to keep his hands busy so he didn’t scribble anything down while he spoke with Merle during the entirety of visiting hours, because idea after idea kept hitting him as his brother rambled on into the late afternoon. Daryl had returned home to spend the rest of that entire week writing like mad; the idea that his brother would be the final person in the company burying itself into the storyline like a tick until Daryl couldn’t help but let it take him where it wanted to go. He knew how his brother was, too smart for his own good, and an asshole to boot. It wasn’t a stretch imagining how he might have insisted on coming to the city, just to split the group into smaller – more controllable –  factions. On an abandoned rooftop downtown, he could use brute force and fear (and what he considered his own kind of ‘charm’) to get the others to start obeying _his_ orders instead of whoever was in charge back at the quarry. It was something that Daryl had seen him do before, and he was good at it too – his brother – so it would work wonders on a group of scared city people in the middle of the damn apocalypse. They’d fall in line just to not get shot.

So the scene played out that way, with Merle grinning wide and high as a kite, ready to start his own reign of terror and selfish chaos – unthinkable things Daryl didn’t even want to _contemplate_ in a world with no consequences. Merle would think no one on that rooftop could stop him.

But his brother would have never expected anyone like Rick Grimes.

Who punched him in the face, handcuffed him to a pipe, searched him and tossed his stash off the rooftop within a matter of minutes. Had taken control of the situation faster than anyone could blink. Gotten the upperhand on _Merle Dixon._ Daryl had only witnessed it happen once, back in their hometown, the Sheriff where he grew up was the only living man that could put Merle in his place – and was probably the only cop his brother had ever had an ounce of respect for – and though Rick was smaller than Merle was, he was about the same size and age as the officer had been back when Merle was getting a run-in with the adult end of the law. Sure Merle was older and meaner now, skin calloused like stone and so tough he could chew up a hammer and spit out nails, but he was also so insanely arrogant it was nauseating at times. Rick could win that battle with little effort, had probably dealt with men like his brother for years on the force. Would have that same resigned, understanding tone that showed he knew all of Merle’s tricks and wasn’t going to be fooled – but also wasn’t going to treat him any different than any other perp he picked up. Just like that old man had years and years ago when Merle spit fire as a teenager.

So Daryl used that old Sheriff’s words and actions to influence Rick’s, swiftly and effectively neutralizing the threat and getting his brother in a spot where everyone could keep an eye on him. Rick could lead, Daryl had seen it in the bar multiple times, how the man could diffuse a situation faster than it could break out – out-of-towners or the fucking college kids starting fights and shouting matches on rare occasions that could so easily get out of hand. It wasn’t a big leap for Daryl to write it out that way, where everything was going to shit but at least one man had a good head on his shoulders. His romanticized version of the Rick Grimes standing on the other end of the bar could make mistakes, had made many mistakes already. But he also made up for them – and he was going to do that in Atlanta by getting the group out of the city alive.

It was the least he could do after getting them cornered in.

Daryl couldn’t take credit for the idea on _how_ they got out alive, that had been gifted to him by a late night texting session with Glenn – who pointed out that the zombies could probably smell everyone from blocks away. There were a lot of ways for a zombie virus to affect a dead body, and the young Korean man had tried to educate Daryl in all the ways it could go down – medically that is. He knew _far_ too much on the subject than what was probably healthy, but it helped Daryl pick and choose how he wanted the hoards of walking corpses to act. How his group of survivors could actually live another day, following the basic rules and guidelines that were being set out. Don’t get bitten, don’t get scratched, they can hear you, they can smell you, some can run, some can hide, they are basically driven by animal instinct – the deterioration of their brains was what factored into how dangerous each zombie could be. They were mindless, but quite a few weren’t dumb. Not this early in the game.

He also still needed to find another name to call them besides ‘zombies’. It was a bit of a mouthful, not to mention it just felt a bit too cheesy to call them that, and as Glenn pointed out – calling them something different would put a good spin on it.

‘Geeks’ was rubbing off on him because of his conversations with Glenn, but he’d already started playing with other ideas. ‘Lame-brains’, ‘Biters’, ‘Roamers’, he had a collective list going, and sometimes T-Dog or Dale would throw out other awful ideas, or Glenn would in the middle of his delivery shifts, but nothing was sticking for the time being. He’d get there, eventually. He’d just scribbled ‘Rotters’ at the top of his page before rereading the scene that had unfolded in a mad rush before Rick had interrupted him.

Glenn and Daryl had come up with the idea that if the group somehow managed to _smell_ like the zombies, then maybe they could get past them to some form of transportation. If one walked slow enough, blended into the hoard, then there was a slim chance of making it. Glenn became very excited about that aspect, started going off on tangents about cutting off limbs and intestines and wearing them too, to make sure the smell would linger – Daryl was more worried about everyone getting infected through their eyes or cuts in their hands. The smallest fucking papercut  or hangnail would be enough when smothered in zombie-blood to infect someone and send them straight into a brain-melting fever, he himself had gotten a damn staph infection through one when he first started working at Dale’s bar. That shit wasn’t something you fucked around with, so it had been his idea to grab trench coats or something from the department store and smear the guts of some zombies all over them, wear them out in the street and drape stuff all over them to keep the smell strong. Now they just needed the supplies.

If he was being honest, Daryl had a little too much fun writing everyone retching and gagging as Rick and Morales turned the zombie they had taken down to gristly mince-meat. It was pretty graphic, and Daryl was reminded that the horror angle was defiantly his forte. Merle would be proud.

That was how he spent the remainder of the evening ignoring the real Rick Grimes across the nearly empty bar, and writing about his fictional Rick and Glenn walking through the crowded streets of Atlanta, trying to blend in with the horde of zombies.

Then, because Daryl was secretly a dick, he made it start raining.

\--

He finally got the peace he so desperately wanted that night after the bar closed. Having the next day off Daryl did what he always did, turned his scribbled notes and ideas into filled out paragraphs – the dark quiet of the late hours, with the sun just beginning to tinge the horizon a lighter shade of grey, was somehow easier to write during. He wasn’t sure if it was the lack of noise, movement, or just that he should be asleep and his brain could somehow focus easier without having all the other thoughts of the day getting in the way. But the words just spilled onto the page, the picture in Daryl’s mind playing out in words and phrases he was sure he’d used multiple times already, telling a story that got away from him at the best of times, and fought him like a drunk Irishman during the worst. It was a headache to deal with, but the results were something he liked to read over and over again, not quite sure how the story had come out of _him_ , but there was no arguing who wrote the damn thing. Only a handful of people even knew about the story, or what it might pertain.

Daryl finished out the scenes from Atlanta at the bar during the early hours of the morning, already off the clock but just using the space to spread stuff out on the tables, and the familiar air was something that wasn’t as claustrophobic as his apartment. T-Dog had made it back to the truck Rick had parked on the loading docks to the building, just in time for them to slam the door shut and the ex-deputy to peel out in the direction of the highway out of the city – not even noticing the lack of a certain loud ass redneck until they were well on their way. T-Dog was defeated and angry and explaining with barely contained agitation at himself that he dropped the damn key, and Rick looked forward – torn in the worst possible way. Because if it had been literally _anyone_ else, everyone would have been in agreement to turn the fuck around, stop the car and figure out how to go get him. Hell he might not have been left behind in the first place, they were scared and inexperienced and would probably get themselves killed trying to save him. It was better this way, an asshole hillbilly with a big mouth that would rather punch a man in the face for being black than try to help the group get out alive – left behind instead of endangering everyone further.

“Best not to dwell on it,” Morales told Rick as they drove down the abandoned highway. “Merle getting left behind. Nobody’s going to be sad he didn’t come back,” and Christ that hurt to write. Because it was fucking true, sad and sobering that no one would miss his older brother if he was left to die like a rat in a trap on some rooftop in downtown Atlanta.

And Daryl didn’t even realize he had Morales add on after a short pause, “Well, except maybe Daryl.”

His pencil stopped after he finished his name, brain finally catching up with his hand because wait – what?

He could imagine Rick saying his name earlier that evening, “Daryl?” when Shane and he were talking on the far side of the bar. Once again Daryl’s hand moved without his permission, writing Rick asking his name. Shane had answered “…the bartender?” with a raised eyebrow.

Morales said “his brother” on paper.

And then Daryl really did have to stop, shifting back in his seat and looking at the few lines he just scribbled down. What was he doing? Without even blinking he brought his pencil back up and scratched out his name, and the lines below with Rick and Morales confirming who he was. The fuck was he doing? Why would he want to be in the story? Sure Merle didn’t have anyone else, really, except for him – and Daryl didn’t have anyone else either when he thought about it. Not back before Merle returned to jail, when he was always high and grinning like a loon and causing more trouble than one human being should.

If the world had ended back then, when Merle thought he was invincible and Daryl was more angry than sad, they would have stuck together. Through everything. Survived like only Dixons could.

So why wouldn’t Daryl be there too?

He stared at the words still legible beneath the heavy lines of his strike-throughs, stunned and not sure how to proceed, the first rays of the sun starting to paint lines of light through the blinds across his stacks of papers.

What was he doing?

Could he really write himself into the story…

Fuck, did he even want to?

\--

It took a long time to get around to it, but Daryl finally picked up his pencil after three days of pretending what he wrote at 3 am that night in the bar didn’t actually happen.

Except he spent the entirety of those three days thinking of nothing else.

Then he just picked up where he left off, as if that was what he was going to do all along.

Fuck it all.

Daryl decided early on that if he was going to be in the story at all – which was still an _insane_ notion that absolutely _no one_ got to know about, except for Denise – and if he had met Rick Grimes under the circumstances of Merle tied to a roof and left to die in the middle of an infested city, that he would hate the man’s fucking guts. To put it lightly.

Daryl had no illusions about what he used to be like, a tightly wound ball of anger and defensiveness – mostly thanks to his upbringing and his brother – with a touch of sass that tended to make him run his mouth a bit too much. He didn’t trust anything with a pulse unless it walked on four legs, hated crowds and drank too much beer, couldn’t hold a job because there were days he couldn’t be bothered to leave his living room, or his safe-zone between the trees in the forest – and really was on the fast track to ending up just like his brother and his Pa. To him, the world was fucked, his life was fucked, and the only thing that had snapped him out of everything was when Merle went to jail and (by association) he almost did as well. It only took a few days for it to hit Daryl that he needed to do _something_ , he couldn’t pay the bills or the rent for the space to park their trailer, couldn’t afford food when he didn’t hunt for his meals, and really was less than a month away from being homeless.

It took finding Jim’s auto shop in North Atlanta to turn him around, make him get four walls of his own (even though he rented) and start doing adult things. Like paying bills on time, feeding himself something besides squirrel and venison, and to stop acting like an asshole to everyone who breathed in his direction.

And that was a long process for him, Daryl was not the same man he was three years ago when he moved into the city, but where he was writing himself into his story – he was back to being the very definition of trailer trash. Angry and unreasonable and clinging to his brother’s shadow. It was hard to imagine what he would have done if he had seen Rick Grimes back then, because three years ago Daryl didn’t know what he wanted. Not really.

But ten months ago when the two partners had walked in for the first time, testing out the hole in the wall that had been there as long as they had been alive, Daryl had felt _very_ differently than he would have when he was younger - at just seeing the man with the intense blue eyes and quiet friendly smile. Daryl had judged Rick pretty harshly those first couple weeks, not knowing the depth to the other man until he had spent an exuberant amount of time staring at him, but there was no denying Daryl found him… very attractive. Gorgeous came to mind, on more than one occasion. He had become so absorbed with Rick Grimes since then, and it was hard to imagine if he would have been as… infatuated as he was now if he had met the man three years ago. Probably not, not at first – so that would make it easier for Daryl to write out what would happen.

Because no matter how much Daryl wanted them to make eyes, connect and say “fuck it” because the world had ended and “why the hell not start something?”, he just couldn’t. Rick still needed to find his family, that was his priority for the entirety of his fictional story, and it still needed to happen. Somehow.

It hit him not too long after Daryl decided to keep his name in the story. After he had spent hours trying to figure out how he would react to the enigma that was Rick Grimes, and figured out what would happen once his younger and more impressionable self found themselves in the ex-deputy’s orbit. Fuck, without Merle around too? He’d fall hard and fast, maybe without even realizing it – bend over backward for the man, do everything he could to help, it might even be _good_ for him. But no, Rick needed to find his family, and Daryl didn’t know why he had never thought of it before. That the camp he had alluded to so many times might hold what he was looking for. It was already going to house Dale and Jim, and Andrea’s sister that she talked about all the time, and Morales’ wife and kids, so why wouldn’t it also have Rick’s family? Lori and Carl none the wiser, and Shane unaware too. Fuck, of course Shane would be there, he couldn’t not be. And he would have tried so damn hard to keep his supposedly deceased partner’s wife and child alive and well. Of course Shane would be the one in charge too, all Alpha male with the training to boot, Merle would’ve hated his _guts_ so that could be why he volunteered to go to Atlanta to try and get his own supporters  – but if they came back with a stranger no one knew, only to realize _who_ he was…. could everything just fall into place like that?

Then the scene just unfolded.

He wrote it early in the morning that week, right as the birds were once again starting to chirp and the sky flirted with lighter shades of black, how no one had known what was happening for a moment. How Rick cried when Carl ran into his arms and the man all but fell to the ground, Lori’s shocked face and Shane’s a complicated mix of relief and happiness that his friend was alive but bittersweet that he’d have to give up –

The affair happened too, alluded to really – Daryl scribbled out vague images and scenes of Shane and Lori being together, come together out of grief and the need to have something with each other. And Daryl felt like a dick because of course Shane would back down, even if it was only at first, because before the dead desolate world Daryl had created stripped the deputy down to his basic instincts – it couldn’t be ignored that Shane was a _good guy_. And the fucking soap opera Daryl almost wrote was _no one’s fault_ , it just all happened the way it did, and to Shane – in that moment – that was that. Rick was alive, he could hold his wife and child and cry, and Shane wouldn’t encroach again. He just loved Rick that much.

Sure he was a dick a lot of the time, but he wasn’t in the wrong in the _story_. Hell, in real life Daryl didn’t really have any proof that Shane was cheating with Rick’s wife, just a gut feeling that he at least wanted to. The same feeling that said the guy could be trouble, could get Rick killed if his anger got the best of him, like Daryl had seen inklings of in the bar when too much beer had flowed. And that worried the redneck to no fucking end. He didn’t want to read another story in the news about Rick Grimes getting hurt, but this time because of Shane fucking Walsh.

It was draining, the drama parts. Daryl had spent so much time focused on the horror aspects of the world he had created he had almost forgotten the mess he had invited in when he decided to keep the characters real and not the fake stereotypes that usually filled the company of stories like this. And what a mess it was, Daryl ended up glossing through stuff – knowing he would come back and add more, add descriptions and characters that he had planned on throwing in there, might even go back and add stories from the camp in the first however-many-pages he’d written already – but he got down the parts with Rick. Rick with his family, reunited and happy. Relieved for the first time since he woke up in the hospital. Able to breathe, and finally think beyond the instinctual need to find his own flesh and blood and just hoping they were still alive. Now he could think about how to make sure they stayed that way.

\--

The whole thing was difficult to get through, especially trying to describe two people Daryl had never actually met before.  Unlike all the other characters that he’d written into the story, these were based off of stories and images provided through a filter – someone else’s vision of who they were – and all of the mannerisms and observations Daryl usually made were stunted. All he had were what the two deputies had told him about them over the past few months, and in one instance even shoved photographs in his face. Rick had wanted to show Daryl pictures, drunkenly one night a few weeks ago, of his son who looked just fucking like him but with straighter hair, and of Lori who was tall and beautiful and everything Daryl pictured she’d be. He refused to be sad about it. To let the man’s drunken smile - that was so fond and proud of his son and so soft when his gaze drifted over Lori’s image - do the weird thing to his heartbeat where it thudded so hard in his chest it felt like it was about to lodge in his throat. Instead he forced the permanent frown on his face into something that might have resembled a smile, it was tilted up a little for a moment at least, easier to hold when Rick was smiling so damn brightly – albeit drunkenly. He also used that moment to memorize every line and detail of the picture, so he would be able to describe them accurately when Rick finally found his family again.

But even as he wrote the scenes, sometimes rushed and sometimes not, Daryl was not unaware that he was focusing more and more on Rick Grimes. His writing was very biased towards him past the point of justification that it was because he was the main character, though he had an array of characters to work with and some that still needed to be introduced. But in the early hours of the morning all Daryl could sometimes focus on was Rick, more waxing poetic on this man that Daryl had written so many aspects and quirks and personality traits into that it was sometimes hard to tell himself when he saw the man each week that they were essentially two different people. Daryl felt like he _knew_ Rick, inside and out, how he thought and what he was going to say before he said it – which was unbelievably _stupid_ of him because he’d barely said ten words to the guy.

The story got a little bit away from him, as far as introducing people at the camp and picking away at mini stories that would probably have to be written out and added somewhere in all the shit he’d already written. But Daryl knew he was just procrastinating, he had been about to write himself into the story – or had been getting ready to anyway – and now that it was approaching when it would make sense to have this asshole redneck come ambling out of the woods he found himself shying away from it. Went into gruesome, gory detail of Rick and Shane and Jim beating the ever loving shit out of a walker that had strayed too close to camp instead. Picked away at their anger and resentment and hate towards the creatures, which would be so fresh to them, where the disease that killed the world had a face and a body they could break and defeat until that animal instinct to kick and smash and destroy whatever it was became sated. It wouldn’t do anything, that face to the disease was rotting off anyway, but it gave them an outlet – might have even helped them think a little clearer.

But then Daryl got to the part he had imagined as an entrance, he would have been on a hunt if he was gone that long, had probably tracked some damn deer for miles in hopes of feeding the whole camp for a night or two. And it was insanely nerve-wracking, to the point he did anything and everything he could to not have to face the last part where someone came out of the brush. He didn’t want to write himself, describe the mean-faced little shit he had been three years ago, he was pretty zen most of the time but there were those moments when he’d spit fire – and they always had something to do with his brother.

Not to mention writing yourself into your own story had to be the most _douchebag-ish_ thing a writer could do. Fuck, he rolled his eyes every time he saw M. Night Shyamalan play a character in his own damn movies. It was making his skin crawl to think he was going to write himself in and actually be interacting with his fucking crush in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. It almost cheapened the whole thing, this wasn’t what it had all started as, and it wasn’t like he was going to… have them get along or anything. Shit he was about to fight the fucker, probably. Leaving his brother on a rooftop like that.

One thing was for sure though, the moment Daryl would exit those bushes and see the group standing around the now headless zombie and his chewed on deer, a handful of things were going to happen: he was going to be _pissed_ about the deer, was going to school those fuckers because the only way to kill a zombie was to get the brain _“don’t y’all know nuthin?”_ , and he was going to notice the gorgeous stranger and promptly stare him down for a moment before stalking off to find his brother.

Which was not going to end well.

\--

“Alright, _alright_ ,” Shane near shouted, confining the college kid that was hissing and spitting like an alley cat in what was probably not exactly protocol even for an off-duty officer. But then again Shane wasn’t necessarily sober, and Rick was keeping a careful eye on him as he got the switchblade out of reach and told the kid’s friends to stay back. “Easy does’ it kid.”

“Choke-holdin’s illegal, man!” the kid managed to gasp out, though Daryl was sure the kid couldn’t stand up straight if Shane hadn’t had a good hold on him, so he just leaned against his bar top and watched with everyone else. If he didn’t have to call the sheriff’s department on them, and the kid’s friends got him to leave peacefully like they did every other week, he’d count it as a win. Normally Daryl was the one that dealt with the boisterous crowd, but Rick and Shane had been frequenting more and more nights a week lately, so he was more than happy to let the two men settle it – as long as no one got stabbed. That damn wooden floor soaked up stains like a sponge.

“Yeah? File a complaint,” Shane grunted as he finally got the kid lowered to the ground, and Rick got to eye level with the younger man as well.

“We gonna be calm ‘bout this now?” Rick asked as level and authoritative as Daryl had ever heard him, and it was mesmerizing to see the man in action. In his element, taking control whether it was given to him or not, while still remaining level-headed and five steps ahead. Which was a feat given the two deputies had already started on their second pitcher of the night. The kid was starting to turn a little red in the face, and the small smirk Daryl had been sporting dropped slowly and he started to think about stepping in, before the younger man nodded stiffly and Shane let him go. The kid scrambled back, coughing and pointing at Shane menacingly, showing they weren’t fucking through – and Daryl wasn’t ready to have to explain what might happen next to Dale, so he did step out from behind the bar and caught Rick’s eye.

“Take your friend home,” Rick told the other college students, who nodded quickly and went to help the angry young man up, his feet slipping out from under him effectively reassuring Daryl that the damn asshole wouldn’t remember anything when he woke up the next morning. Rick said something else to one of the kids who looked the most sober, handing him the switchblade he had confiscated, and sending him on his way with a steady stare – but Daryl didn’t hear any of it as he escorted the whole damn group outside. Holding the door wide open and everything, his own angry glare making sure the kids kept fucking stepping after they made it out the double doors. He was really tired of their shit, and was going to talk to Dale about getting their asses banned from the bar before they started a real bar fight.

“Hey,” a voice said far too close to him, and Daryl whipped around to see Rick standing there reeking of beer but still managing to look like he was stone cold sober. “Thanks for the backup, that could have gone badly,” he said with a huff of laughter and a small smile, making Daryl look down and start to panic without the barrier of the bartop between them. He was close enough for Daryl to see they were the same height, to duck his head down and instead of seeing the mats on the floor see the length of the other man’s body, and his heart began to beat so hard it hammered against his ribcage.

“Didn’t do nuthin’,” he muttered out, chancing another glance at Rick’s face before beating a hasty retreat back behind the bar. Immediately busying himself with the other patrons that wanted more rounds after all the commotion, which gave him enough time to mull over the interaction and desperately want to bang his head against the wall. He could barely fucking _talk_ to the guy, how did he expect to form any kind of realistic scene where they actually met in his story? Daryl spent the rest of the night chewing on his lip and running scenarios through his head – trying to find one that would fit.

All of it boiled down to the question ‘would Daryl be attracted to Rick way back then?’ Because that was going to dictate how he reacted to the other man. Which – yeah, probably – though back then he wouldn’t know what to fucking do with that information. _But_ , once he found out about his brother’s fate, was that going to take precedent over some fucking crush?

Oh who was he kidding, of course it would – no one had ever been there for him except for Merle, and if Merle had come back for him after the world ended Daryl would be glued to his side the whole time. The only damn reason he wouldn’t have been with him in Atlanta in the story would be if he was making himself useful elsewhere, and that could lead to the hunting angle Daryl had figured out a week or two prior. Daryl hadn’t always been angry and resentful, where he pictured himself to be in the story, and hell the world ending would almost feel like a fresh start – or as fresh as it could get while still being stuck to Merle’s shadow.

So – late that night, after the almost fight at the bar, Daryl tried to write out the interaction as best he could. He pulled from the college kid, who had reminded him so much of himself that it was almost scary, and was probably why he hated the kid so damn much. But the scene that unfolded grew quickly out of hand when he screamed and hollered and threw the string of squirrels he had over his shoulder after exiting the woods – which meant something because like hell Daryl would ever throw away all that food when there were kids going hungry. He even cried angry tears a bit because Merle was going to die like a damn animal caught in a trap and there was nothing he could do about it! Fucking screamed at them _“TO HELL WITH ALL Y’ALL!”_ , demanding to know where Merle was stuck at, saying he’d go get him his damn self if he had to. Fuck these people, and everything they claimed to stand for, no one gave a damn about trash like Dixons even after the world went to hell.

The angry words and phrases tumbled and meshed together on the pages as Daryl wrote hard and fast as the scene unfolded behind his eyes, and it wasn’t until he pulled back, hand protesting in strategic cramps, that he looked back and realized what he’d done.

He had written himself as the antagonist.

Just another hot-tempered redneck, exactly like his brother. A younger version of himself he hadn’t looked back on in ages, before Merle went back to jail three years ago and he had to find his own way. Daryl had known he was going to write himself around that time, but not when he was at his lowest, and even reading the interaction where he was obviously hurting but didn’t trust any damn person in that camp to help him – even he hated himself. But it filled that hole he had felt a few weeks before, continued the storyline, and there was a small comfort in the fact that Rick had fucking _offered_ to go back for Merle. With Daryl.

It was exhausting, writing all the emotion and hurt and connecting a character to himself so intimately that it became a self-reflection. And as he stared at the pages, time passing without writing any more words, Daryl began to wonder if he would have ever even had a chance making it alone in the world – if he had remained like he had back then. Without his brother.

Merle was all he had.

Rick knew what that was like, could at least relate to that aspect if nothing else, but he had only just found his family – and if Daryl turned on them because Merle was dead, or had risen into a zombie (which scared Daryl to fucking _death_ ), Rick would put a bullet between his eyes before Daryl could raise his crossbow. Daryl didn’t mean anything to him, for all Rick knew he was a liability just like his older brother. No matter how much Daryl didn’t want his character to be, he knew it was true.

If he and Rick didn’t rescue Merle in the story, Daryl was almost certain he would end up killing himself off before they ever made it back out of Atlanta.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone, I am so - so sorry the hiatus lasted longer than I thought it would. A lot has been going on and I ended going on a lot of trips instead of writing/working. I even went on a roadtrip and met a few fellow Rickyl writers and it was amazing C: though I got very little done in that time XD I have a couple weeks left of crazy work and then I will be leaving my job before I move so I will have all the time to write \o/ Until then updates will be sporadic but I _am_ here and still working on my fics, thank you everyone who has been checking in on me and making sure I was still alive  <3
> 
> This is short, sorry in advance, BUT there is also a little side story now up in the collection that is a little more... M-rated than this story. Daryl's got a wild imagination ;) feel free to check it out if you are interested.
> 
> Many thanks to my two betas and lovely women in my life IJustWantedYouToNeedMe and MaroonCamaro, thank you for helping me through the last month <3 to all my readers who are still around thank you for being awesome and I hope you enjoy this one. I will be replying to comments soon I hope.

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He had just cut off Merle’s hand.

It was laying there next to the bloody handcuffs, still dripping wet and grotesquely bright in contrast to the bleached cement rooftop. Daryl’s character had screamed, paced in panic and horror and couldn’t stop looking at the hand lying on the ground amongst the blood splatters and hacksaw with chunks of flesh still caught in the teeth. And once the shock had passed, Daryl knew the rage he would’ve felt in that moment – that his brother had been reduced to doing this to himself, or dying in the Georgia sun.

He also knew the rage people would expect of him, and though he shouldn’t have been focusing on the hypothetical people that may or may not end up reading what he was writing - it still made him falter until he was once again stuck.

It was mid-afternoon when Daryl found himself just standing behind the bar top, with no one else in the tavern except for himself because Dale had bailed on him just after noon to run some errands. He was in his usual spot leaning against the old wooden counter with his notebook in front of him, staring blankly at the page where Rick has his gun pointed at his head - telling Daryl he won’t hesitate, and that he doesn’t care if every walker in the city hears. He had written Rick calling them walkers a few days prior, liking how easily it rolled off the tongue with a Southern drawl (that he absolutely did _not_ imagine over and over and _over_ ), and went back a ways in his story to have Morgan call them that as well. It was growing on him, and though he texted Glenn and asked what he thought about it as a replacement for ‘zombie’, the younger man didn’t seem too enthused. If Daryl decided he didn’t like it later he could always go back and change it again, but every time he wrote it down it flowed in such a nice way – especially when he imagined it spoken low in Rick’s Southern Kentucky twang behind the barrel of a 6” revolver. Which was also insanely distracting, and Daryl had to bring himself back by rereading what he had written and trying to figure out what his next move would be with that same gun pressing against the back of his skull.

He knew what he would _want_ to do.

Daryl remembered himself back when he was used to living in his brother’s shadow, and he had mulled it over and over for _days_ what he might be like if he was ever violently thrown into a world where he not only had to fend for himself – but do so without the overbearing dictation of his last name. Could that be the chance where he could finally throw the name Dixon in the dust? Despite everything, Daryl knew once the shock and knee-jerk reaction of anger was let loose – and he was forced to stop and let it all hit him instead of making someone bleed for what happened – he would be sad, worried as shit, only focusing on how his brother just fucking mutilated himself and was out there somewhere bleeding to death. He’d want to lower his weapon like Rick had told him to, would want to try and reel in the anger, even though he knew that if he did it would just make everything more real. He’d probably do that weird thing where he’d choke on a sob, an ugly habit bred into him with fists and his daddy's belt. Dixons didn't fucking cry, but sometimes he couldn’t help it, so he had taught himself to just cut that shit off at the source no matter how much it sucked. He had too many scars across his shoulder blades from the few tears that had always escaped despite that. And although it was a trait that was his, something he couldn’t help, he also knew a sob or a few tears that he’d wipe away hurriedly behind an angry squint before someone thought he was fucking _soft_ didn't sound like it fit his character. It was too… real sounding. That didn’t make good writing, right? Everyone had a niche, a set of guidelines, and he was the dick in this situation. They didn't get to cry. He was just the redneck asshole little brother of the bigger redneck asshole, and honestly he should just let Rick shoot him right then and there. Let them get their guns and get back to the quarry, back to Rick’s family that he searched Heaven and Earth for, and have them forget all about trash like Dixons. Even in a world that had ended, they still weren’t worth the trouble.

Daryl had been staring at that page and chewing on the end of his pencil for at least an hour, reading the same damn paragraph over and over, and still hoping for a different outcome. But it just didn’t feel like what it was supposed to be, what all those movies and TV shows and Glenn’s stupid video games said were meant to happen. Characters like Merle and Daryl Dixon were disposable, because no one cared what happened to them either way. It was as those last few thoughts crossed his mind that something heavy sunk from this throat to his stomach, and Daryl just felt defeated. Sad. And suddenly he didn’t feel like writing anymore.

Would all of this build-up really be for fucking _nothing_? He finally just got to the part where he was actually okay with writing himself into the story, and able to interact with Rick without acting like a fucking idiot all the damn time despite what had ended up happening so far. He had met the man, thrown squirrels in his face, and gone on what could have been a really cool adventure through the devastated remains of Atlanta – only to have it all end with the man of his dreams splattering his brains across some shitty rooftop downtown. Because Daryl Dixon just wasn’t worth the damn effort.

“You okay?”

Daryl’s gaze snapped up and it was Rick, bright blue eyes clear and sober and far too close as he leaned on the bar top. It was still mid-afternoon, far too early for the deputies to be showing up for their Tuesday night routine, but Daryl could spot Shane in the back already setting up the pool table and Rick was standing there looking far too good in the dim lights about to ask for a pitcher. They had been showing up more frequently lately, early enough to beat the general rush hour people on their way home from work – which kept him fairly busy for a couple hours – followed by a lighter wave of people around 9 once the dinner crowd started retreating to whatever corners of town they wanted to hide in. They got patrons from all walks of life at Dale’s, and for a long time Daryl had wondered what could possibly drive someone to walk inside the dingy hole in the wall that looked more like a haunted house entrance than an actual bar – but over the years he had come to see what others saw. In the shaded bar it was easy to forget they were right off Main Street, that they were in Buckhead which was a richer area where a lot of the original residents were from the wrong side of the tracks, and the strange combination of commuters and local populace seemed to find sanctuary inside the four walls. The shabby building could very well be the one place this side of Atlanta where no one would judge you when you walked through the doors. Maybe that was why Shane and Rick had started showing up so religiously the past month or so, if nothing else the bar was quiet and close to the Sheriff’s Station.

Daryl snapped back to himself after a (probably very awkward) long stretch of silence, swallowing hard and shifting back so his body swayed away from the bartop, anything to look like he wasn’t racking his brain for something that wasn’t the truth. But having those piercing blue eyes watching his every move was insanely distracting, thrilling and uncomfortable, and Daryl couldn’t get his thoughts in order. He could just brush the guy off, get his pitcher and send him on his way, mumbling something about being fine – but there was something in the way Rick was looking at him that was earnest and showed he didn’t want a bullshit answer, since he hadn’t moved an inch and was waiting patiently for a response.

“Yeah, yeah – just,” His reply died on his tongue, stuttered to a stop when Daryl stopped trying to look away from Rick’s face and instead got trapped in the blazing blue that stretched for miles. His words got away from him, pulled from him as honest and seamless as when he was writing words on a page. “Don’t like where this is goin’,” he admitted quietly, finally able to tear his gaze away to regard the notebook on the polished counter. “Thinkin’ I’ll just trash it.” It shouldn’t have been that devastating, the realization that even though he had written himself into his story things weren't going to go the way he wanted them to – to be honest the whole story never went the way he had first imagined it would. It was like the words wrote themselves, but he hadn’t expected all this build up to get to this _damn_ situation that really only had one outcome. It had been real and raw and gritty for the entire time, and just as he wrote himself and his brother in to further the plot and round out the diverse group of survivors at the edge of the world – the ugly reality was that Rick should just shoot him then and there and get on with trying to survive. It was heartbreaking, which was dumb because it had killed any and all will to write, and Daryl really hoped he could get it back. Maybe if he went back and made up a character that wasn’t Merle, that didn’t have a brother and instead the trip to Atlanta was just about the guns. Maybe they would stay at the quarry longer, maybe they didn’t have to return to Atlanta at all. No matter how much he liked it, the potential he had seen before they got to the rooftop and Merle hadn’t been there, it had all just spiraled into something that could only go one way. Fuck, he sucked at this. He really should just trash it.

“What?” Rick protested in shock, looking genuinely upset about Daryl’s answer. “But you’ve been working on it for weeks!”

Daryl knew he looked like Rick had punched him in the face, because the words struck him so hard in that moment his whole body froze. Rick had seen him writing, paid attention enough to know it had been going on for a while – had he seen Daryl staring too?

Fuck _._

Fuck fuck _fuck_.

“Sorry, I just,” Rick stammered out with a small smile, gesturing towards Daryl’s notebook and the pencil still in his hand, “you chew on your pencil – when yer thinking hard about somethang, and normally you get an idea and just start writing for a straight half hour.” He chuckled a little, and Daryl couldn’t tell if it was humorous or nervous from the rushing of blood pumping in his ears. “It’s just strange to see you staring at it for so long.” Daryl’s heart was going to beat out of his fucking chest, because Rick had been _watching_ him. “So, what’s wrong?” he asked like it was obvious, and Daryl had to wonder how much it showed all over his damn face when something was bothering him – he always thought he had a very blank expression, Merle told him he had resting-bitch-face, and no one had ever asked him what was wrong before. He almost didn’t know how to answer.

That and the fact that Rick Grimes had been fucking _watching_ him was still front and center and devastating.

“Um… nothin’,” was his genius retort, “just – I have this… character I’m about ta kill. And I don’t want to, but I don’t know what else ta do with him.”

“Do people die a lot in your story?” Rick asked with an inquiring tilt to his head.

“It’s…” God he was so nervous, Daryl knew he was flushed red as a damn tomato and the heat raced from his cheeks down his neck and beneath the collar of his shirt hotly. “Kind’of a zombie… apocalypse – story. So yeah,” fuck he was just full of intelligent responses today, wasn’t he? Daryl was pretty sure the fact he had admitted his story was about _zombies_ filled his dumbass quota for the day and he should fucking stop talking while he was ahead. But Rick was watching him with that same curious squint to his eyes that was too damn endearing for a grown ass man and it made words keep spilling from Daryl’s throat. “But it’s more ‘bout the people than th’ zombies, mixin’ up people who ain’t ever met normally. Seein’ what they can do t’geth’r… ta survive…”

Holy shit what the hell was he doing.

Stop. Fucking. Talking. Dixon.

Rick smiled, a huff of air exhaled around the gesture mimicking a laugh that made embarrassment burn hot and shameful in Daryl’s gut until words followed the other man’s slow grin. “I like that.” It must have been painfully obvious how unexpected that response was, because Rick’s smile only widened at Daryl’s continuously stunned expression – and the man pressed on anyway, leaning further over the bar and refolding his arms against the polished countertop. Right in Daryl’s space, making the other swallow hard and sway backwards despite the gravitating pull of the other man’s blue eyes. “So this guy, you don’t want ta kill him because you like him?”

“Nah,” Daryl shook his head and ducked down to look at the notebook in his hands instead of the man in front of him. “He’s just… some redneck asshole.” He couldn’t help the smirk that crawled up one corner of his mouth if his life depended on it, and he was sure it came off as more of a grimace than anything – but there was no way Rick didn’t see every inch of detail with the amount of attention he was giving Daryl’s face. That reminder was enough to help him school his features before he regarded his notebook again and thought about the contents inside. “Guess I’m just disappointed is all, that the world ain’t changed nothing.”

That the world hadn’t changed him, and what everyone expected him to be. ‘Just some redneck asshole’ might as well have been tattooed on his forehead since he was old enough to walk and talk and sass at anyone that got too close. His legacy he could never shake, permanently stained into everything he did and how he saw himself – as much as he had tried to change that the past few years. Bringing up everything from such a dark time and immortalizing it on paper was not really turning out like Daryl had thought it would, and his own damn writing had led him to this very moment: with his back against the wall, a gun to his head and a man more than capable of pulling the trigger. Because in the end Daryl Dixon would always just be ‘some redneck asshole’ that wasn’t going to change. Only Rick’s good faith kept him from just pulling the trigger outright, because Rick Grimes was a good man, and to Daryl that hesitation meant the world – but to his character in the story? Angry and devastated and not thinking right? The only thing that would get through that Dixon rage and thick-headed skull _would be_ a bullet.

The world hadn’t changed one damn bit, even after it ended, and Daryl couldn’t believe how fucking disappointing that was.

But he couldn’t tell Rick all that.

The deputy looked confused by his statement, and was quiet for a moment until it was flirting with becoming awkward once more – because Daryl apparently couldn’t ever function like a normal human being – until he cleared his throat in the quiet of the bar, with the buzzing of the music and the TV and Shane chatting to someone in the far corner by the pool tables. “Well, what if he did? Change, I mean,” and Daryl jerked his head back up, looking at Rick and watching how the other was still getting lost in his face – making the bartender question if Rick maybe had started drinking before coming in again. But Rick was smiling at him softly and continuing despite Daryl’s stunned expression, “What if he’s the one who changed for the better, without the world bearing down on him?” A numb buzzing sensation fizzled through Daryl’s brain and limbs warmly as the other man spoke, a light euphoric feeling that lessened the vice that had been clasped tight around his chest all damn afternoon – it felt a lot like hope, though Daryl didn’t want to dare name it that. Did Rick know the character was supposed to be himself? Was he trying to hint at something? Was he biased about the change in Daryl’s character because he knew the man?

Or was it possible that it was just that easy? It was never that fucking easy.

Daryl looked down for the millionth time at the notebook he had snatched up before Rick came over, a thoughtful daze taking over the stunned expression he’d been sporting. And Rick just barreled on.

“Think about it, he doesn’t have to be the bad guy because of his background, sounds like the world doesn’t get a say in who people get to be anymore. Sounds nice,” he added wistfully with a smile that was tinged in a bittersweetness Daryl wasn’t expecting, and then the man was gone. Picking up the pitcher that Dale had poured while he and Daryl were in deep conversation, nodding at the man who must have returned without either of them noticing, and giving Daryl one last upturn of his lips before he headed towards Shane at the back of the bar. Leaving Daryl staring after him a little dumbstruck.

Did all that just happen?

A distinct clearing of the throat was heard beside him and Daryl came face to face with a deadpan sort of accusing face from his boss next to him, that was far too knowing – making Daryl’s already heated face burn red hot.

“S’rry,” Daryl mumbled, setting down his notebook and hiding behind his bangs while Dale turned and went back to his office without a word. Though he could practically hear the old man rolling his eyes at him. There was no one else at the bartop that needed anything, a few patrons had already been served refills by his boss or had retreated to their dark corners, so all that was left to do was pick his pencil back up and flip to the page where Rick had his gun pointed at the back of Daryl’s head. Chewing on his pencil he thought about what Rick had said, what he had originally thought he had wanted to do in that moment, and what had stopped him from going that route – that it wasn’t what his character was supposed to do. That it wasn't what people expected him to be, and the world had always been right about him and his family for as long as he’d been alive to question it.

But this was a new world, the old one was dead – so it could go fuck itself.

This was Daryl’s world now, he had written the whole damn thing on instinct and personal experience and jotting down whatever popped into his head. So he got to say what he became, what was acceptable, and what direction it would all go in. The story could grow and continue like the runaway train it had been from the beginning, as if anyone could ever stop it.

_Fuck it._

Daryl then began to write, right where he left off.

He put down the crossbow, choked on a sob, and asked T-dog if he had a do-rag on him to use for Merle’s hand.

 


End file.
